Film History for the Anthropocene: The Ecological Archive of German Cinema (Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual, 23) 1640141618, 9781640141612

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FILM HISTORY FOR THE

ANTHROPOCENE The Ecological Archive of German Cinema

SETH PEABODY

Film History for the Anthropocene

Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual

Series Editors Gerd Gemünden (Dartmouth College) Johannes von Moltke (University of Michigan) Also in this series A New History of German Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson (2012) The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School, by Marco Abel (2013) Generic Histories of German Cinema, edited by Jaimey Fisher (2013) The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film, edited by Robin Curtis and Angelica Fenner (2014) DEFA after East Germany, edited by Brigitta B. Wagner (2014) Last Features, by Reinhild Steingröver (2014) The Nazi Past in Contemporary German Film, by Axel Bangert (2014) Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928–1936, edited by Barbara Hales, Mihaela Petrescu, and Valerie Weinstein (2016) Forgotten Dreams, by Laurie Ruth Johnson (2016) Montage as Perceptual Experience, by Mario Slugan (2017) Gender and Sexuality in East German Film, edited by Kyle Frackman and Faye Stewart (2018) Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin, by Mila Ganeva (2018) Austria Made in Hollywood, by Jacqueline Vansant (2019) Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968, edited by Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel (2019) Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany, by Seth Howes (2019) The Films of Konrad Wolf, by Larson Powell (2020)

Film History for the Anthropocene The Ecological Archive of German Cinema

Seth Peabody

Copyright © 2023 Seth Peabody All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2023 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 9781640141612 (hardcover) ISBN-13: 9781805431459 (ePDF) ISBN-13: 9781805431466 (ePUB) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data is available from the Library of Congress. The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash.

Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Filmic Worlds, Creativity, and Materiality, or: Welcome to the Anthropocene?

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Part I 1: Companions and Combatants (or, Hugs, Fights, and Bites): Curating Multispecies Environments in Die Geierwally 28 2: From Industrial Heimat to Bavarian Heimatfilm: Sprengbagger 1010, Hunger in Waldenburg, and the Consolidation of a Genre

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Part II 3: Infrastructure in the Anthropo(s)cene: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive

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4: Image, Environment, Infrastructure: The Social Ecologies of the Bergfilm 116 5: Greenwashing in Black and White: Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, Die Stadt der Millionen, Menschen am Sonntag 139 Epilogue. Welcome Back: Reflexive Environments in Recent German Cinema

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Works Cited

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Index 195

Acknowledgments

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all my family, friends, colleagues, students, mentors, and teachers. Two anonymous readers offered generous and constructive feedback regarding my initial manuscript. Jim Walker at Camden House has provided steady guidance throughout this project. Eden Bradshaw Kaiser served as a tremendous editor for the final revisions. If the resulting product feels like a coherent book, it is largely thanks to the input from these four individuals. I have benefitted from supportive colleagues ever since my first job out of graduate school; my research has benefitted from their collaboration and mentorship no less than my teaching. Particular thanks are due to Kiley Kost, Juliane Schicker, Amanda Randall, Charlotte Melin, and Dan Nolan. In the midst of many challenges for higher education, my department chairs have consistently provided the support and guidance that allowed me to continue my work: thank you to Laura Goering, Wendy Allen, Kristen Hylenski, and especially (again) Charlotte Melin. In the past three years, Carleton College has offered support and flexibility as I rewrote much of this book; I am particularly grateful for the Summer Research Circles and Student Research Partnerships made possible through the Humanities Center at Carleton, and to the Office of the Provost for support to help junior faculty restart their research after disruptions due to COVID-19. I have been lucky to work with excellent students who served as researchers, interlocutors, and editors at many different stages of this project. Thanks especially to Nadia McPherson, Esme Krohn, Jens Bartel, Jacob Schimetz, Will Seaton, and Abigail Bauer. Far-flung networks have long been a staple of my research process. I am grateful to my collaborators in the online project Environment, Engagement, and German Studies, who have provided a consistently productive working group over these years when so much was in flux. Colleagues in the GSA’s Environmental Studies Network, the GSA’s CLEAT committee, and the DDGC collective provide ongoing inspiration that has benefitted my work in terms of both product and process. The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society offered an ideal writing environment during my time there as a Carson Fellow in summer 2019 and a visiting scholar in 2013–14. Many thanks to Christof Mauch for his energetic leadership and wise mentorship. Thank hank you to

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you to all the RCC contacts who both expanded my thinking and sharpened my focus, especially Jenny Price, Nicole Seymour, Jon Mathieu, and Robert Groß. For the opportunity to publish or give lectures on smaller portions of my research as I have worked toward this larger project, and for the scholarly communities that resulted, I am grateful to Caroline Schaumann, Paul Buchholz, Sean Ireton, Emily Jones, Thomas Herold, Pascale LaFountain, and Matt Anderson. Kamaal Haque has been a particularly valued interlocutor for my work on mountain film. Diane Nemec Ignashev led me to questions regarding Derrida, Levinas, and hospitality that proved pivotal for the introduction. This book began years ago as a PhD dissertation at Harvard University. As I drafted that early version of what would become Film History for the Anthropocene, Eric Rentschler was all that one could ask for in a dissertation advisor: rigorous, timely, critical, honest, yet thoroughly supportive. Numerous teachers and mentors offered valuable guidance; thanks especially to Oliver Simons, Markus Wilczek, Judith Ryan, and Stephen Mitchell. Generous funding allowed me to finish the dissertation efficiently: I am grateful for a dissertation completion grant from the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and a Fulbright IIE grant that funded a year at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. Most of chapter 3 was published as “Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive” in Colloquia Germanica 53, no. 2–3 (2021): 249–67. Chapter 4 is adapted from the article “Image, Environment, Infrastructure: The Social Ecologies of the Bergfilm,” published in Humanities 10, no. 1 (2021). I am grateful for these journals’ permission to include this material. Finally, I have been able to complete this book while maintaining some semblance of a normal life thanks to tremendous patience, support, and love from my family. My parents, Cot LaFond and Lionel Peabody, and my siblings, Lydia and Dan Peabody, have supported and motivated me in too many ways to enumerate. Over the past nine years, my children, Josie and Benno Howard, have provided the spark for me to finally finish this project. My wife and partner, Christine Howard, has done more than anybody could imagine in order to make this project possible. This book is for my family.

Introduction. Filmic Worlds, Creativity, and Materiality, or: Welcome to the Anthropocene? “

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Anthropocene.” This ambivalent greeting is the title, and the final sentence, of a three-minute video that opened the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20. The video features a series of line graphs illustrating the accelerating rate of human impacts on the environment since the midtwentieth century, all superimposed over an image of the earth in space. The image zooms in and out to focus on various regions of the earth, with concentrations of light and networks of animated lines illustrating the various aspects of environmental change detailed in the voiceover and diagrams. The overt message of the film is that humans are altering their environment at an unprecedented and potentially catastrophic rate, but that time remains to change course. However, the fact that a film was chosen as the opening for the conference, the largest UN gathering that had ever been held, offers another message. The Anthropocene appears as a filmic phenomenon. The filmic medium combines the narrative power of text, the indexical authenticity of photography, and the dynamic possibilities of the moving image (to say nothing of digital manipulation), so that what initially appears as the standard “Blue Marble” image of the globe is set into motion. Film renders visible the long-term environmental consequences that are most often envisioned in abstract figures or hockey stick-shaped graphs. Critics have emphasized the impact of such graphs and their contribution to popular-science presentations in promoting the concept of the Anthropocene as a dominant term in discourse about the environment.1 And certainly, the graphs and powerful words of the video command the viewers’ attention. But neither the graphs nor the ominous monologue serves as the final authority in this influential cultural product about the Anthropocene. The graphs disappear about two minutes into the film. For the final minute, the narrator describes the implications of her assertion that “we have entered the Anthropocene,” while the image shows only the earth, crisscrossed by fine hair-like lines illustrating the globalized networks of contemporary human society. elcome to the

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Adamson, “Networking Networks,” 349.

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In the film’s concluding moments, the authoritative voiceover declares: “Welcome to the Anthropocene.” The stern tone of this statement indicates that it is an unwelcome welcome, while the descending pitch of the vocal intonation and the slow, deliberate cadence provide added emphasis to these last words of the film. But the image outlasts the sound. What holds the viewers’ interest as the film ends and the voice, in its attempt to control meaning within a single message, has faded? One striking aspect is the darkness that surrounds the globe, which would reinforce the intended sense of fragility implied by “Blue Marble” or “Earthrise” images of the earth from space.2 But in the final five seconds before the screen fades to black, a new point of interest emerges: the image of earth tilts within the frame to show the northern polar regions, revealing a dramatically accelerated vision of the yearly cycles of polar ice receding and expanding, with each annual cycle lasting about one second (fig. I.1). By shifting its digitally synthesized image to show the polar ice cap growing and shrinking incessantly,3 the film reveals the technological infrastructure upon which it relies. In addition to a sense of fragility promoted by the image of earth from space, it might equally give rise to horror at this cyborg earth, a material-technological media phenomenon that the viewer now realizes, perhaps for the first time in the film, that they have been watching since the beginning.4 Welcome to the Anthropocene is a recent film created by an international team for a global audience and a premiere at a UN conference hosted in Brazil. Still, it bears relevance for an exploration of German film history. This short film carries on a process that German films have engaged in for more than a century. Commentators have long been aware of a focus on environments within German film, and contemporary German society is now seen as a model for environmental thinking, yet the environments of German films have been repeatedly analyzed as political parables rather than (also) as examples of environmental thought. Starting from the foundational tension between materiality and creativity, as already seen in the opening discussion of Welcome to the Anthropocene, this book reconsiders unexamined environmental aspects of German film and finds that German cinema in fact has much to offer regarding the creative, critical, and cautionary possibilities of film as an environmental medium. The pages and chapters that follow examine various titles 2 For an account of earth-from-space imagery and its impact on environmental discourse, see Poole, Earthrise. 3 For analysis of sea ice and digital satellite imagery in relation to communication about climate change, see Wormbs, “Shrinking sea ice”; Schneider and Nocke, “Image Politics of Climate Change,” 10; and Wormbs, “Eyes on the Ice,” 53. 4 Cf. Demos, Against the Anthropocene, 18; Gurevitch, “Google Warming,” 88.



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Figure I.1.  Arctic sea ice in the final moments of Welcome to the Anthropocene. Online video screen capture.

from German cinema as ecological archives that, similar to Welcome to the Anthropocene, use the filmic technologies of their day to capture the physical world as it already exists and set it into motion, and, by so doing, catalyze ongoing processes of environmental change, even as the physical materials shown on screen convey stories that expand beyond the control of the filmmakers.

Anthropo(s)cene Environmental films exhibit tensions between fantasies of hubristic control and irreducible diversity and polysemy. Similar tensions have emerged through discussions of the Anthropocene, a concept that has become a prominent and controversial keyword in environmental discourse over the past two decades. According to the timeline recommended by the Anthropocene Working Group, the Anthropocene—the epoch defined by humankind impacting the earth as a geological change agent—began in the mid-twentieth century.5 Much debate remains over whether the beginning of the Anthropocene should be dated much earlier—for example, in the late eighteenth century at the beginning of the industrial revolution, or fifty thousand years ago at the onset of settled agriculture—or whether a starting date should be defined at all.6 But regardless of when the Anthropocene began, human impacts associated with this new geological epoch accelerated tremendously in the twentieth century. 5 6

Zalasiewicz et al., “Anthropocene,” 289. Ruddiman et al., “Defining the epoch we live in,” 38.

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And within that century, film played a major role both as instigator and recorder of changes in the Anthropocene. Film’s environmental footprint has been well documented; perhaps most prominently, a 2006 study found that the film industry was second only to the oil industry among polluters around Los Angeles.7 But at a more fundamental level, film is inherently Anthropocenic: it envisions cinematic worlds creatively, selectively, manipulatively. A cinematic world is always already a world that bears physical witness to human activities. Of course, the Anthropocene concept has been justly criticized from numerous angles. It seems to suggest a universalizing view of humanity, yet different countries across the globe, and different communities within individual states, have contributed vastly different amounts to global environmental change and are at immensely different levels of vulnerability to the dangers of environmental degradation. Further, just as the Anthropocene’s implication of a uniform view of humanity in the twenty-first century is flawed, its suggestion of historical development also ignores significant facts. With its fable of a vanguard of scientists trying to save the uninformed masses from themselves, and in its portrayal of a sudden break between an ignorant past and a knowing present, “the grand narrative of the Anthropocene is thus the story of an awakening. There was a long moment of unawareness, from 1750 to the late twentieth century, followed by a sudden arousal.”8 While this narrative arc offers a compelling story of change over time, “the problem with all these grand narratives of awakening, revelation or arousal of consciousness is that they are historically wrong. The period between 1770 and 1830 was marked on the contrary by a very acute awareness of the interactions between nature and society.”9 The Anthropocene features neither a uniform “Anthropos” as the cause of geological change, nor a clearly defined “-cene” that can be set off chronologically against the Holocene due to any fundamental change in human understanding of the planet. How, then, might this concept still prove valuable? Rather than serving as a chronological marker of a historical break or a blanket term arising from an all-powerful, uniform notion of humanity that asserts control over nature, the Anthropocene might be seen as a different way of understanding humans’ view of their creative entanglement with the environment. Poet Tsveta Sofronieva has written of the “Anthroposcene” as a moment of deliberate self-performance of humans as they realize their environmental impact.10 It is thus simultaneously an 7 Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint, 4. 8 Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene, 73. 9 Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene, 73. 10 Sofronieva, Anthroposzene, 4. While my use of the neologism “Anthroposcene” is most directly inspired by Sofronieva, a number of other authors have



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environmental and aesthetic application of theories of reflexive modernity that have been discussed by scholars such as Ulrich Beck as a mark of postmodernity. The break between “modern” and “postmodern” is no more inherently useful than the supposed break between the unknowing earlier epoch and the enlightened ecological thinking of the present that Bonneuil and Fressoz criticize in the grand narrative of the Anthropocene: what is useful is the fact that film did not exist before this supposed break. It has always been an aesthetic form that draws its materials from the physical world, whether those materials are the leaves of the trees that quake in the wind above the baby being fed in the Lumière brothers’ film of 1895, or the human bodies and constructed sets that crowd the studio spaces in fantastical cinematic worlds such as Méliès’s Trip to the Moon of 1902. Whether physical items captured on screen are seemingly natural or made by humans, film’s communicative power arises simultaneously through the creative manipulation of images and through the agentic and storytelling power inherent to the physical bodies captured within those images, a power that precedes any authorial intervention. The film industry goes to great lengths to control filmic environments—Brian Jacobson has explored these efforts with regards to movie studios, and Paul Dobryden has examined issues of environmental control within the spaces where films were exhibited.11 But as Jordan Schonig has argued, film displays “incidentals” from the environment that are “unplannable, seemingly impossible to design, predict, or reproduce,” and precisely these “incidentals” have been cited as the details that often fascinate audiences—yet these incidental prefilmic events are integrated into a complex new environment created on screen.12 Film presents a physical world that is subject to creative intervention by humans, but the material world responds in unpredictable ways to these attempts at control. With this in mind, filmic environments offer themselves as an apt object of study within the context of the Anthropocene, for the tension between control and unpredictability is already present within the environments and aesthetic products of film. It is for these reasons that I describe my project as German film history for the Anthropocene. While the intervention within German film history and the particular analyses in the chapters below are new, recent work has provided a wealth of insights related to those pursued in the present study. In her 2018 monograph Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene, made use of the same pun; see, for example, Perry, “Anthroposcenes”; Lorimer, “Anthropo-scene”; Malkmus, “The Anthroposcene of Literature”; and the Pennsylvania State University Press book series entitled “AnthropoScene.” 11 See Jacobson, Studios Before the System and Dobryden, The Hygienic Apparatus. 12 Schonig, “Contingent Motion,” 32.

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Jennifer Fay suggests that the idea of the Anthropocene is useful within the specific context of film studies because both are centered around the human production of a world: “The Anthropocene is to natural science what cinema, especially early cinema, has been to human culture. It makes the familiar world strange to us by transcribing the dimensionalities of experience into celluloid, transforming and temporally transporting humans and the natural world into an unhomely image.”13 Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s distinction of earth and world, in which the earth is a given that is external to humans, whereas the world is a product of human design and creation, Fay writes that “filmmaking occasions the creation of artificial worlds” while also revealing the limits to human creation: “cinema enables us to glimpse anthropogenic environments as both an accidental effect of human activity and a matter of design. Thus, not only is cinema like the Anthropocene in its uncanny aesthetic effects, but also, insofar as cinema has encouraged the production of artificial worlds and simulated, wholly anthropogenic weather, it is the aesthetic practice of the Anthropocene.”14 In showing environments both by accident and by design, Fay argues, the aesthetics of film align with the experience of the Anthropocene. Beyond Arendt’s earth/world binary, Fay draws at length on the writings of Siegfried Kracauer. Fay’s introduction reflects on Kracauer’s 1926 essay “Kaliko-Welt: Die UFA-Stadt zu Neubabelsberg” (“Calico World: The UFA City in Neubabelsberg”), which comments on the unreality, strangeness, constructedness, and transience—and yet, the similarity in materials and objects—that both separate the massive UFA studio from, and connect it to, the world outside the studio. Fay points out that if Kracauer’s ideas are transported forward nearly a century, they resonate in remarkable ways with the Anthropocene concept of a world that is significantly altered by humans, but that as a result is becoming increasingly unlivable for them. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s notions of “ecology without nature” and “dark ecology,” Fay reads Kracauer’s essay as a theory for appreciating the way film has both created and documented an unwelcoming world, and nonetheless invited the viewer to stay with that world.15 In the discussion of Kracauer, she connects classical film theory with present-day ecocriticism in productive ways. Moreover, she gives significant attention to ideas about hospitality and the idea of a “welcome” that will be discussed below. Fay’s book thus establishes a foundation for many of the ideas pursued in the present volume.

13 Fay, Inhospitable World, 3. 14 Fay, Inhospitable World, 4. 15 Fay, Inhospitable World; cf. Kracauer, “Calico World”; Morton, Ecology Without Nature; Morton, Dark Ecology.



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While much of my analysis aligns closely with Fay’s work, there are notable differences in our responses to recent ecocritical theory. In Inhospitable World, Fay writes that “eco-criticism often attends to our planetary emergency as a corruption of a presumed natural place or a crisis that demands sustainable models so that the status quo may persist or be restored.” In other words, she suggests that ecocriticism is focused on solutions and arises from a perspective of loss or nostalgia. In contrast to this tendency within ecocriticism, Fay writes that her own analyses “emphasize our always unnatural and unwelcoming environment as a matter of production, a willed and wanted milieu, however harmful, that is inseparable from but also made perceivable through film.”16 The present volume takes a somewhat different approach: while the chapters below often emphasize unwelcoming or unnatural environments produced through cinema, they often draw on precisely the ecocritical theories that Fay dismisses. To be sure, some studies of ecocinema have examined how films from recent decades have contributed to or counter­ acted environmental sustainability in the context of what Joachim Radkau calls the “age of ecology” (by which Radkau refers to the period starting in the 1970s, in which environmentalism gained prominence as a global social and political movement).17 In one prominent example, Scott MacDonald has argued that experimental films can create “a cinematic experience that models patience and mindfulness” and thus foster “a deep appreciation of and an ongoing commitment to the natural environment.”18 Others studies have examined popular genres for their environmental implications or studied explicitly environmentalist films to better understand how they might succeed or fail in educating viewers and instigating change toward greater sustainability.19 While these are useful topics, the interest of the present study—like that of Fay’s book—lies further in the past and encompasses a broader approach to media ecology: how does film function within cycles of imagination, scientific discourse, and physical transformation? Whereas Fay dismisses ecocritical approaches in order to focus on unwelcoming environments, I suggest that recent theories from ecocriticism—and in particular, the tensions and contradictions between them—might help to illuminate precisely the fraught status

16 Fay, Inhospitable World, 4. 17 Radkau’s book, originally published in German as Die Ära der Ökologie: Eine Weltgeschichte in 2011, offered the first book-length global history of the environmental movement. 18 MacDonald, “The Ecocinema Experience,” 19. 19 See, for example, Brereton, Hollywood Utopia; Ingram, Green Screen; and Willoquet-Maricondi, ed., Framing the World, 23–80. For an overview of film ecocriticism, see Kiu-wai Chu, “Ecocinema” and Ivakhiv, “Green Film Criticism and Its Futures.”

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of filmic environments that are of interest to both Fay’s study and my own. In the chapters that follow, the analysis draws on two seemingly opposing ideas, each of which relies on various creative and theoretical voices within the broad field of environmental humanities: that of film as a creative medium under complete control of the filmmaker, and that of film as a medium drawn from physical materials that exert agency fully independent of the filmmaker. One approach to film as an environmental medium foregrounds the role of artists as deliberate, creative curators of the physical environment. Since the advent of the filmic medium, filmmakers have been aware that they were constructing the world that they were also documenting.20 Film thus comprises an archive of not only the Anthropocene, but also of the Anthroposcene, following Sofronieva: it documents a period of human self-reflexivity regarding the constructedness of the physical environment.21 This process began with studios that were designed based on prior building models that included, as Jacobson points out, “photography studios, theatrical stages, scientific laboratories, hothouses, factories, and mills,” resulting in “a new type of architectural, industrial, and artistic space” that ultimately made possible the filmic environments portrayed on screen.22 Focusing in particular on one prior architectural model, Paul Dobryden notes that “German cinema had its premiere in a greenhouse”—that is where the Skladanowsky brothers first exhibited a series of short films in Berlin in 1895—and that both greenhouses and film technology were valued for their ability to store, control, and reproduce life within specific controlled conditions.23 In other words, in both production and exhibition, film serves as an archive of deliberately constructed worlds. One example of this emphasis in the chapters that follow is the discussion of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in chapter 3, in which the film’s climactic flood gains additional resonance through consideration of both the massive (fully functional) water infrastructure in the studio that was required to create an on-screen image of infrastructure failure, and in the ways these images would have landed differently with viewers who had recently lived through significant infrastructural transformations and disruptions within the rapidly expanding urban environment of Berlin. On the other hand, theorists of material ecocriticism have argued that the physical world is itself an agent in human storytelling, in that “the 20 Adrian Ivakhiv provides a theoretical discussion on the world-making potential of the cinema. His “process-relational” model for film offers links to both media ecology and ecocriticism and draws heavily on the ideas of Martin Heidegger, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Gilles Deleuze. Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image, 6–13. 21 Sofronieva, Anthroposzene, 3–4. 22 Jacobson, In the Studio, 10–11. 23 Dobryden, The Hygienic Apparatus, 3.



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world’s material phenomena are knots in a vast network of agencies, which can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narratives, stories . . . All matter, in other words, is ‘storied matter.’”24 Linking this approach to film, Nadia Bozak has studied how films seem to appear as light and sound on screen, disconnected from the physical world outside the voyeuristic space of the theater, but in fact derive from massive industrial systems with physical ecological impacts distributed across vast stretches of space.25 Adrian Ivakhiv’s discussion of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979) uses this approach to identify not only the ecological themes embedded in the film’s narrative, but also the impacts that extend beyond the diegesis of the film, for example in the cancers that plagued the film crew after filming in massively polluted industrial sites.26 According to these approaches, human agency is just one causal element among many that are distributed throughout the material world. Taken to the extreme, this view suggests that human storytellers are in fact being curated by their environments, rather than vice versa. Timothy Morton and Anna Tsing offer models for a more nuanced approach; Morton’s notion of the “mesh” of agencies provides a model for considering human and nonhuman forces intertwining, and Tsing’s examination of a dense complex of humans and nonhumans surrounding the matsutake mushroom trade (discussed in chapter 1 of the present volume) follows an approach of multispecies ethnography that shows how such an analysis might be carried out. Chapters 1 and 2 build on these approaches in their analyses of the Heimatfilm genre, which consider the films’ on-screen aesthetics, rural and industrial environments, human and nonhuman animals, and discourse connecting films to broader issues of labor, industry, environment, and politics. In each of these cases, nonhuman animals or materials have significant impacts on the film; foregrounding these nonhuman elements can yield insights that helpfully complement the lessons gained from an analysis focused on aesthetic choices or sociopolitical contexts. Certainly, humans tell stories and curate the images on screen, and human choices and power structures are at play and have social and political implications that cannot be easily transferred to the nonhuman world—attention to the nonhuman does not deny the existence of human culpability for the consequences of films. Still, questions from material ecocriticism provide ways to appreciate elements of the physical world that extend beyond the control of the filmmakers and that shape the form and impact of the films. Material ecocriticism and the concept of the Anthroposcene seem to stand in opposition to each other, since the former emphasizes the agency of the non-human world while the latter focuses on humans’ 24 Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction,” 1. 25 Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint, 9. 26 Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image, 20.

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self-conscious alteration and curation of the physical environment. But in fact, numerous films demonstrate the productive interplay between these two fields of thought. To study these overlapping issues, the first two chapters of the present volume focus on issues of discourse, especially with regards to the German concept of Heimat (home or homeland). The films discussed in these first two chapters explore how rural landscapes on film, as well as films that juxtapose rural and industrial landscapes, became a node for debates about social, political, and economic goals related to the environment. The final three chapters focus on infrastructure, including both the urban infrastructure captured in documentary footage or constructed in a studio, and the new tourist infrastructures that made distant Alpine realms accessible within filmic environments. The groupings of the chapters form a two-part structure within the book, where the first focuses on discussions of Heimat and the second emphasizes the materiality of infrastructure, yet this neat distinction between discourse and materiality is for the most part a convenient fiction. Films analyzed in relation to Heimat discourse in the first two chapters also contribute to and rely on the development and accessibility of tourist landscapes as well as the industrial transformation of rural areas into factories. In the second half of the book, Metropolis is of interest as much for its role as an archive of environmental discourses of the day as for the science-fiction infrastructures it displays; mountain films arise through new filmmaking technologies, and then become part of the visual language of the rising ski industry and contribute to new technologies and infrastructures for that industry beyond the films; Berlin semi-documentaries simultaneously document the city and promote the habits upon which the city depends. In each case, natural or physical environments and cultural representations mutually form and impact each other. And yet, despite the mutual embeddedness of the material world and cultural representations, some conceptual separation proves useful in understanding their impacts. I therefore turn to models from environmental history that, especially when combined with theories of filmic ecologies, provide a framework for understanding the interplay between the material and the discursive aspects of film. In their social-ecological interaction model, Verena Winiwarter and other environmental historians of the Vienna School describe human society as existing at the zone of overlap between the fields of nature and culture (fig. I.2). In the interactions they propose between these zones, cultural representations lead to new practices and structures of feeling, which in turn impact the work that human societies carry out on the natural world. Based on their experiences of a modified natural world, humans create new representations, and the cycle begins anew. Of course, the distinction between “nature” and “culture” is artificial and has been criticized, but proponents of the social-­ecological model argue that it still has value because it suggests a “possible means of intervention” within both spheres:



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Figure I.2.  Social-ecological interaction model (adapted from Winiwarter and Knoll, Umweltgeschichte, 129). Reproduced with permission from the authors.

“society can ultimately only be reached through communication” whereas “interventions in nature, or into the physical world, can only be effective by means of physical forces—nature is not susceptible to cultural or symbolic action.”27 Since words alone cannot change physical environments, much of the environmental impact of cultural products occurs indirectly, and the social-ecological model offers a helpful means for visualizing how cultural products can lead to material changes. The model allows for some complexity via the zone of overlap, in which the physical structures related to cultural products (such as film studios, distribution infrastructures, and movie theaters) can be included within the spheres of both human “culture” and material “nature.” Still, the example of film reveals a shortcoming of this model: through the equal emphasis on all forces and the neat symmetry between sides of the diagram, the model suggests a steady process. All of the arrows seem to have equal and continuous velocity. Film, I propose, acts as an accelerator: it allows representations to suddenly move faster and show more than would be possible with words or still images; it can thus move the field of representation at a rate that can far exceed the pace of change that humans experience in the world. We might think of film as considerably increasing the thickness of the vector moving from “humans and biophysical structures of society” toward “culture.” While some of this momentum is lost in the process, some 27 Fischer-Kowalski and Weisz, “The Archipelago of Social Ecology and the Island of the Vienna School,” 21.

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residual speed transfers to an increase in programs and projects that in turn accelerate the pace of change in the sphere of nature. Adrian Ivakhiv provides a useful foundation with his detailed theoretical framework for considering changes between the film world and the extra-filmic world. During a film’s production, in one’s experience of viewing a film, and in one’s interactions with the world after experiencing a film, he proposes that there are impacts in the realms of social, perceptual, and material relations.28 Ivakhiv’s nuanced theoretical approach, peppered throughout with tripartite categorizations inspired especially by the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, allows for intricate analyses of numerous individual films. However, when it comes to considering the relation between film and the outside world, Ivakhiv produces a model that seems to move in one direction. Films impact viewers, who in turn emerge with changed relations in the broader world (fig. I.3). In fact, Ivakhiv’s model, especially when combined with Laura Frahm’s assertion that filmic space is inherently dynamic and trans­for­ mative,29 might serve as an enhancement to the interaction model of social ecology, while the ongoing cyclical process suggested by the socialecological model might compensate for the context that is missing from Ivakhiv’s framework. Film certainly operates on numerous levels in terms of its immediate visual and visceral impact, its emplotment of images and characters within complex situations, its ability to capture and transform the material world into a moving film world, and its implication within complex networks of funding, production, distribution, and exhibition. By plugging all of these forces into the seemingly stable cycle of socialecological interactions, we can use Ivakhiv’s model to appreciate the role film plays, not necessarily to change individuals’ perceptions, but rather to creatively reflect on, reimagine, critique, or celebrate changes in the nonfilmic world through deliberately designed filmic landscapes. By so doing, films contribute in powerful ways to the cultural processes that are already driving environmental change.30 Combining Ivakhiv’s process-relational model with the Vienna School’s model of social ecology provides a lens for seeing how film is embedded into processes that impact the physical world. But beyond this status as a creative medium that impacts the non-filmic world, film also serves as a record of visual traces of the physical world. In other words, film also functions as an archive. Archives have been described as offering 28 Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image, 341. 29 Frahm, Jenseits des Raums, 13. 30 See the discussion in chapter 4 of mountain films and the growing ski industry in the Alps for one such example of how the visual language of film contributes to physical changes to the environment.



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Figure I.3.  Adrian Ivakhiv’s process-relational model. Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image, 341. Reproduced with permission from the publisher.

the hope of “somehow connecting to a past we can never fully know”:31 the physical materials of the archive enhance the limited life span and memory capacity of individual humans. In defining the word “archive,” dictionaries tend to focus on collections of documents deliberately preserved by archivists. But an ecological archive—understood in this study as a collection of sources that yields insight into the physical environment, changing ecological processes, and environmental discourses—also draws on physical materials created and preserved independently of, or as an unintentional byproduct of, human agency. The ecological archive of cinema includes films’ explicit plotlines about environmental topics (as seen in the discussion of rural and industrial landscapes in chapter 2), landscapes captured in the background of a film scene about an unrelated topic (seen for example in the discussion of Alpine landscapes in chapter 4), and even the scratched surface of a film print that bears witness to the past environments of the film’s storage, distribution, and exhibition (as discussed in relation to Metropolis in the third chapter). The storytelling power of film draws on all of these environmental components. Scholars 31 Manoff, “Theories of the Archive,” 17.

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of new materialisms argue that “things (or matter) draw their agentic power from their relation to discourses that in turn structure human relations to materiality”; in other words, “phenomena result from the intraactions of material and discursive practices and agencies.”32 Film, with its inherent tension between creative manipulation and indexical realism, is a particularly useful medium for this approach because it sits at a middle ground between documents created and preserved intentionally, and physical materials into which information is inscribed regardless of human intent.33 The creative curation that renders film a medium of the Anthroposcene, as described by Sofronieva and emphasized in Jacobson’s and Dobryden’s studies of controlled filmic environments, combines with the traces and impacts of the material world emphasized by scholars and theorists like Iovino and Oppermann, Morton, and Tsing, to yield the value of film as an environmental medium within the Anthropocene. The creative and the material, filtered through the social ecologies of film, combine to create the ecological archive that this book takes as its object of study. It is an archive of ecological thought, but also a part of ongoing interactive processes or ecologies. Film is a particularly lively member of the global oikos, the Greek word meaning “home” or “dwelling,” that provides the root for the term “ecology”—cinema is not only the recordkeeper but also a contributing member of this household of the Anthropocene.

The Unwelcome Welcome, or, Welcome Back to the Anthropocene As a member of the oikos of Anthropocene ecologies, what kind of a welcome does film provide into this dwelling?34 In Welcome to the Anthropocene, the short film’s final moments show the entire earth, and they show within a span of seconds physical and visual processes that unfold over decades. The Anthropocene, understood this way, is an idea that relies on film, and it is an idea whose scale has little space for individual humans. But the final sentence, “welcome to the Anthropocene,” implies an act of welcoming or an offer of hospitality. Within the faceless, temporally accelerated, and globally scaled vision of the Anthropocene, who might be speaking this welcome? And who might be receiving the offer of hospitality? In other words, who has the ability to welcome whom 32 Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction,” 4; cf. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 3. 33 Cf. Lethen, Der Schatten des Fotografen, 16. 34 In her discussion of hospitality in relation to film and the Anthropocene, Jennifer Fay describes a goal “to reconnect ‘eco-cinema’ to its etymological roots of eco (from oikos, meaning home or dwelling).” Fay, Inhospitable World, 15–16.



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into the Anthropocene? And what can a notion of “welcome” even entail when it is not a comforting dwelling place that is being entered into, but something more akin to a dystopian future? I now return to the short film to consider these questions—which lurked at the margins during my opening discussion of the film Welcome to the Anthropocene—and find that the Anthroposcene of cinema provides a helpful alternate perspective. The website that hosts the short film Welcome to the Anthropocene suggests that the hospitality suggested by the film’s title may not be appropriate at all: “Well, ‘welcome’ might not be the best word to introduce the Anthropocene, the epoch of our making. For, indeed, the Anthropocene can be seen as a global package of bad news—for humanity as well as for our planet’s biosphere.”35 Jennifer Fay discusses a 2011 article in The Economist, likewise called “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” that describes human technological advances and the possibility of dire environmental consequences. In reflecting on this article, Fay writes that “this title is perhaps the most appropriate form of invitation to think about human agency, climate change, and catastrophe as a matter of and for hospitality,” since it ends with “a story of humans overstaying their welcome.”36 Fay’s discussion of hospitality begins by summarizing Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment-era argument that the necessity of humans living together on a shared planet with limited resources will lead to peaceful exchange, industriousness, and hospitality in order to facilitate shared life on a finite planet. But given that the industrial progress instigated during the Enlightenment is now threatening to render the planet unlivable, Fay asserts that “the Anthropocene confronts us with the unsustainability of Kant’s model.”37 Later, in responding to the Economist article “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” Fay asks: “as the accidental creators of a climate we cannot control—as a species, as unique individuals, as a force of nature—who are we to welcome anyone or anything to the Anthropocene? Who or what welcomes us?”38 Fay considers Jacques Derrida’s discussion of offering a welcome as being a possible extension of power: by welcoming others, one claims one’s own authority over a place. At the same time, a more expansive approach to hospitality can allow “a welcome that acknowledges both the claims of the dispossessed and the vulnerability and rewards that befall those who open their home or nation to the refugee, to the stranger, to a god, or to a potentially threatening or inclement event.”39 Fay’s engagement with Derrida gestures toward a radical openness suggested by a “welcome” spoken within the medium of film. 35 https://globaia.org/anthropocene. 36 Fay, Inhospitable World, 129. 37 Fay, Inhospitable World, 15. 38 Fay, Inhospitable World, 130. 39 Fay, Inhospitable World, 130.

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It is noteworthy, and goes unacknowledged in her analysis, that Derrida’s discussion of hospitality arises through an engagement with Emmanuel Levinas. I propose that Levinas’s exploration of an ethics arising through radical openness between self and Other yields additional insight into the welcome offered by film. For discussions of welcome and hospitality, the philosophy of Levinas provides crucial input, but for the environmental topics at issue in the present study, Levinas’s relevance is complicated by the fact that his philosophy sits in a tense relationship with environmental ethics because of his patently anthropocentric thinking.40 Levinas was of Jewish ancestry; during the Nazi regime, he was imprisoned in a labor camp in France and his family in Lithuania was murdered. With his life directly impacted by horrors that were carried out based on ideas of what was “natural,” Levinas avoided references to the nonhuman world and focused insistently on ethical encounters between humans.41 And yet, this focus on human interaction—paired with questions centered around hospitality and welcome that arise through encounters between the human subject and the never-fully-knowable Other—might provide a framework that lends itself well to the human-defined environments of German film, and of the Anthropocene. Indeed, the insistence on the centrality of the human offers a corrective to problems with the role of humans in both Anthropocene discourse and German film history. Derrida situates the core of Levinas’s ethics in the encounter with the Other as expressed through welcome or hospitality. In this interpretation of the act of welcoming, the subject is subjected to that which they are inviting; the “welcome of the other” becomes the welcome belonging to the other.42 The host becomes guest, or even hostage to an encounter with something that exceeds themselves. To say “welcome to the Anthropocene” is to place oneself in the position of the guest or the hostage. Derrida proposes that “to dare to say welcome is perhaps to insinuate that one is at home here, that one knows what it means to be at home, and that at home one receives, invites, or offers hospitality, thus appropriating for oneself a place to welcome [accueillir] the other, or worse, welcoming the other in order to appropriate for oneself a place and then speak the language of hospitality.”43 Initially, the film Welcome to the Anthropocene 40 See Edelglass, Hatley, and Diehm, “Introduction: Facing Nature After Levinas,” 1–3. 41 Edelglass, Hatley, and Diehm, “Introduction,” 2. 42 Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 23; cf. Raffoul, “The Subject of the Welcome,” 215. 43 Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 15–16; cf. Raffoul, “The Subject of the Welcome,” 216.



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seems to do exactly what Derrida here condemns. By showing the earthas-data and earth-as-image in three minutes of CGI animation, the disembodied voice seems to claim ownership and control over the global image into which it welcomes the viewer. But the voice ends, the image lingers, and then it too fades. What here has been welcomed—speaker, viewer, or geological epoch? And who owns the welcome? I contend that film not only serves as ecological archive of the Anthropocene, but also welcomes the viewer into that archive in a way marked by the openness of radical hospitality.44 The fact that the image dwells after the voice has faded suggests that there are experiences beyond the seemingly omniscient and authoritative consciousness of the voice. The viewer is left as an Other that is unknown to and exceeds the understanding of the film’s voice, and the lingering image of the earth suggests the possibility that viewers might situate themselves in a not-yet-known position within the spinning globe. In these spaces between the film’s data, image, and sound, new possibilities for hospitality emerge. The film’s concluding line, “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” is founded on the self-assured belief in its own unwelcoming aura. But despite this confident tone, the film’s conclusion gathers together multiple media that rely on irreducibly different ways of knowing and communicating. To cap off these contradictions and complexities, the film concludes with what sounds like a beginning, in the form of a greeting or salutation—i.e., a welcome. These gaps at the end of the film—perhaps of any film—suggest that it yields to an alterity that is beyond its control. The “welcome” of the film’s final line is an invitation into the impossible space of digital cinema. Film might thereby offer an appropriate response to Derrida’s assertion that “we do not know what hospitality is, not because the idea is built around a difficult conceptual riddle, but because, in the end, hospitality is not a matter of objective knowledge, but belongs to another order altogether, beyond knowledge, an enigmatic ‘experience’ in which I set out for the stranger, for the other, for the unknown, where I cannot go.”45 As an “experience” that we can construct but into which we cannot go, Derrida’s vision of hospitality seems closely aligned with Heimat46 and with film, and might also serve as a way of understanding the spatiality and experientiality of the Anthropocene: it 44 On Levinas’s radically open approach to hospitality, see Kearney and Fitzpatrick, Radical Hospitality, 85. 45 Derrida and Caputo, “Community Without Community,” 112. 46 The oft-cited conclusion to Ernst Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope) describes Heimat as a place that is known to all but remains an inaccessible ideal or utopia: “something that shines in on everybody in childhood and where nobody has yet been: home” (in the original: “etwas, das allen in die Kindheit scheint und worin noch niemand war: Heimat”). Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1629.

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is something we have created but from which we are always excluded, to which we are always other.

German Film History for the Anthropocene While the Anthropocene concept describes humanity’s impact on a global scale, cultural products and physical projects that impact the environment are often framed within national borders. As Christof Mauch points out, “ideas about nature . . . are often closely bound up with notions of national identity: thus, the nation, although an entirely human construct, is indeed a viable unit for considering the history of the environment.”47 These factors account for another important difference between the present study and past works such as Ivakhiv’s Ecologies of the Moving Image and Fay’s Inhospitable World, both of which employ a transnational scale in their exploration of film and the environment. In contrast, the present book focuses on one specific national cinema. This narrower lens allows an appreciation of how film factors into cultural forces and environmental projects within a specific national context, and also allows the study of individual films within the historical arc of a national cinema, yielding insight into how filmic environments become part of an archive that can be revisited in later films. The present study approaches the question of film and the Anthropocene through a lens focused on German cinema, and thus draws on the historiography of German film. That historiography has been dominated by questions of political history and national identity; environmental questions have remained largely peripheral. In the most famous example, Siegfried Kracauer’s book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) creates a gripping narrative about German cinema that positions it as a symptom of a deep-seated psychological longing for order in response to the chaos and lost authority of German society after World War I. Kracauer writes that “the films of a nation reflect its mentality in a more direct way than any other artistic media” due to the large number of people who work on a film and the mass audience who consumes the finished product.48 He thus justifies his psychological interpretation of a wide variety of motifs—from passive or regressive sons, to tyrannical or monstrous authority figures, to sublime landscapes and fallen heroes—as a vast allegory for Germany’s damaged psyche after the national defeat in 1918.

47 Mauch, “Introduction,” 2. 48 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 5.



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While one might take issue with the teleological approach suggested by Kracauer’s title,49 the book offers a fascinating and unified approach to German cinema by one of the masters of twentieth-century film theory and criticism, and has therefore exerted tremendous influence on subsequent studies. In a direct engagement with Kracauer’s legacy, Anton Kaes reverses Kracauer’s chronological framework: rather than claiming that Weimar film foreshadows fascism, Kaes argues that major works of German film from the interwar period reveal responses to the trauma experienced in World War I, based on the contemporary discourse of shell shock as well as close analyses of Weimar-era films.50 Thomas Elsaesser examines the same period as Kracauer and Kaes: he treats Weimar cinema as Germany’s “historical imaginary” and enfolds Kracauer’s study, as well as Lotte Eisner’s book on Weimar cinema, The Haunted Screen, within the simultaneous development of German history and German cinema: “The Zeitgeist said to be speaking from their images and stories is thus a doubly mediated one, refracted across two defeats, in 1918 and 1945 . . . Weimar cinema is not just (like) any other period of German cinema, it is [German] cinema’s historical imaginary.”51 Other prominent studies have focused on the interplay between film history and sociopolitical context within different moments in German history, as in Eric Rentschler’s study of Nazi cinema, Johannes von Moltke’s study of Heimat films from the 1950s, Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel’s collection of essays on German film and the 1968 generation, or Mattias Frey’s study of German film after the fall of the Berlin Wall.52 Of course, numerous rigorous studies—including the titles mentioned above—have examined aesthetic nuances and artistic movements or epochs within German film history; it would be false to suggest that German film studies have focused exclusively on grand historical and political narratives. Yet, it is telling that in so many of the most influential studies of German 49 Regarding the “ostensible teleology that leads from Wiene’s 1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Hitler,” Johannes von Moltke writes that “the latter could not be deduced from the former; but illuminated by the advent of Hitler, by the event of National Socialism, the cataclysm of a world war, and the revelations about the Holocaust, Wiene’s film—indeed, the medium of cinema as such—becomes legible as an important origin, a ‘newly discovered beginning’. . . . In other words, From Caligari to Hitler is the result of specific historiographic choices that subsequent critics have alternately hailed as a path-breaking genealogy of the present or dismissed as so many distortions of the past under the pressures of exile.” Moltke, The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America, 95–96. 50 Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema. 51 Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema, 4. 52 See Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion; Molkte, No Place Like Home; Gerhardt and Abel, Celluloid Revolt; and Frey, Postwall German Cinema.

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film, political questions have dominated. Telling, but not surprising: from their origins in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the histories of filmic technology and of the modern German state arose out of the same era, and film has played a key role in German national propaganda or cultural self-understanding at various moments. Scholars have therefore, understandably, debated at length the place of politics and social movements in German film history. The place of place, however—by which I refer to material environments and ecological systems, as emphasized in approaches employed by the environmental humanities—has remained notably absent from German film historiography and theory. To be sure, place as a concept has been studied in connection with specific film genres and other German cultural texts.53 But within broader studies of German film history, environmental approaches have not played a significant role. This lacuna is striking for a number of reasons. The history of cinema features a repeated focus on nature imagery and overlaps with developments in environmental history. Numerous reports hold that early cinematic audiences were fascinated with background motion from the environment as much as by human subjects, most famously in the example of the short Lumière film Le Repas de bébé (The Baby’s Meal, 1895), which (according to “one of the most persistent anecdotes of film history”54) impressed audiences more because of the moving tree leaves than the smiling child. The “phantom rides” of early cinema frequently involved progress through a seemingly natural landscape and were often created by a camera mounted on a train, thus pairing a transformative media technology with a transportation technology that was altering the environment at the same moment.55 Even earlier, key moments of transition from still pictures to moving images arose through attempts to document natural processes, as seen in time-lapse photographic studies of plant growth by Wilhelm Pfeffer and Étienne-Jules Marey in the 1890s or Eadweard Muybridge’s 1870s images of horses running.56 Films of landscapes were featured among the short episodes captured in early cinema reels. 53 Past scholars have explored space and place as concepts, but without a focus on physical environments or materiality. For example, both Johannes von Moltke and Friederike Eigler explore German Heimat culture via theories from cultural geography. See Moltke, No Place Like Home, especially 10–13; and Eigler, “Critical Approaches to ‘Heimat’ and the ‘Spatial Turn,’” especially 33–43. 54 Schonig, “Contingent Motion,” 30. 55 Lynne Kirby has taken the parallel between railroads and cinema further, arguing that “the railroad should be seen as an important protocinematic phenomenon, a significant cultural force influencing the emergence and development of the cinema during the silent period in both the United States and Europe.” Kirby, Parallel Tracks, 2. 56 Gaycken, “The Secret Life of Plants,” 56–59; Chris, Watching Wildlife, 6.



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Within German film specifically, the links between environment and cinema go far beyond these broad intersections between the cinematic medium and environmental images and histories. When filmmakers have described differences between German cinema and Hollywood films, a focus on filmic environments has been seen as a central trait of German film. When UFA set out to compete against Hollywood by creating a distinct visual style, primary elements included the unrealistic environments of Expressionist works such as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, dir. Robert Wiene, 1920) or the monumental sets for films such as Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924) and Metropolis (1927). British filmmaker Peter Hopkinson reports that during his early career as a camera assistant, he was told by American film director King Vidor: “In Hollywood, the cameraman lights the star. In Europe, he lights the set.” Hopkinson continues: “incomparably, in those great German silent films, it’s the design, the décor which is doing the work, really telling the story.”57 Likewise, when Fritz Lang described the “spirit” that German filmmakers were able to imbue into their works and that eluded Hollywood filmmakers, he referred specifically to a scene in Metropolis in which Rotwang chases Maria through the catacombs, with his flashlight falling primarily on the walls of the underground tunnels while pursuing his victim. Lang’s intended point is that he was able to create a dramatic effect by using simple creative means that Hollywood directors would not have tried.58 But his anecdote also reaffirms the point made by Hopkinson: to a large extent, the effect of influential German films arises through their use of sets and lighting to create a distinctive filmic environment. Further, a number of German film genres, especially in the Weimar era, focused explicitly on the environment. In this way, German film offers a different example than German literature. Literary ecocriticism arrived late in Germany; one possible reason is the lack of a prominent tradition of nonfiction literary nature writing, compared to the prominence of works such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring within American literature.59 For studies of cinema, however, no such excuse exists. From the first decades of the German film industry through today, some of German film history’s most prominent genres and directors have focused explicitly on the natural world and its 57 Cinema Europe III: The Unchained Camera, 22:50–23:11. Kelly Robinson likewise highlights the strong influence of German camera operators and lighting technicians within this broader trait of European cinema; see Robinson, “Flamboyant Realism,” 64 and 68. 58 Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 185. 59 Goodbody, Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-­ Century German Literature, 22.

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transformations through human intervention, often blurring the boundary between documentary and fiction film. This trend can be seen in prominent Weimar-era genres such as the city symphonies and mountain films, as well as postwar features such as the rubble and Heimat films. Despite this wealth of environmentally focused films, an environmental focus has remained largely absent from German film studies, which have focused instead on the (admittedly complex) political contexts and implications of German film history. Moreover, the environmental and the political are constantly connected in complicated ways, as seen in contexts ranging from the way human-nonhuman relations are curated within the film cultures of Weimar, Nazi, and postwar Germany, a topic explored in the analyses of multiple renditions of Die Geierwally in chapter 1; to the different approaches to industrial and rural landscapes to serve diverse social ends, as explored in chapter 2; to the curation of environments ranging from Alpine ski slopes to urban transport lines in order to promote distinct goals regarding social, political, and economic change no less than environmental transformation, as discussed in chapters 4 and 5. Within these intersecting questions of politics and environments in German film history, the political implications have been previously fleshed out in detail, but the environmental questions merit further attention. My project offers a parallel account, an environmental, ecological, material-discursive history of German cinema that has unfolded alongside—and in continual intersection with—the political and psychological history that Kracauer and so many subsequent film scholars have documented. The title of Kracauer’s book From Caligari to Hitler highlights not only the specific historical context of Weimar film, but also the more fundamental notion that films exist within a process of change and development. As such, Kracauer’s title shows an affinity between the traditional political approaches to German film history and the environmental approach taken up in the present study. Filmic space, as Laura Frahm tells us, is inherently dynamic.60 It is always a place that is becoming a different place. Environmental history likewise tracks changing environments; the vision of a stable “natural climax” was discarded in the mid-twentieth century as scientists and historians became increasingly aware that natural systems are inherently dynamic and that disturbance is the norm rather than the exception.61 Human impact may increase the scale or scope of the disturbance, but the notion of a stable natural world independent of humans is a popular fantasy, false both in its separation of humans from “nature” and in its vision of a nonhuman world without change. In one of the founding texts of ecocriticism, Lawrence Buell included a list of four characteristics that might be used to identify an “environmental text”; 60 Frahm, Jenseits des Raums, 15. 61 Mauch, “Introduction,” 5.



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one of the four is that “some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.”62 Whether in discussions of history or culture, an awareness of dynamic change has become a core element of environmental understanding. Kracauer therefore suggests an unintended affinity between film history and environmental history, in that his framework employs film history as a lens on processes of change. Moreover, although Kracauer’s main title From Caligari to Hitler suggests a predictable process of teleological development from a clear starting point toward a known conclusion, his subtitle of a “psychological history” suggests something much more open-ended. Film is the work of many people—and also many landscapes, species, and materials. It shows more than is intended and guides the viewers toward a place they may not want to go. As a response to Kracauer’s psychological history of German cinema from Caligari to Hitler, my book offers a material history from Babelsberg to the Anthropocene. Films guide their audiences through a filmic world derived from the physical world; they thus welcome viewers into the deliberately designed Anthropo(s)cene. But the viewer also sees more than what the filmmaker intended. The visual imaginary of film contains all those material objects in front of the film, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving: the web of agencies captured on screen exceeds the filmmaker’s ability to control the filmic environment. There is always more to see. The interplay between deliberate, creative curation and the communicative power of the nonhuman material world creates an ecological archive within cinema.

Structure of the Book In the following chapters, I examine films and film discourse (in the form of reviews, advertisements, and articles), as well as texts that provide important context for the environments of German cinema, with particular focus on the Weimar era but also tracing the implications up to the present day. The first section of the book comprises chapters 1 and 2. These chapters consider the interplay between film discourse and environmental history, using films and discussions of Heimat in German film as the object of study. Of particular interest are discussions of Heimat within film prior to the term’s codification as a genre during the Nazi and postwar eras. I argue that within Weimar film, Heimat functioned as a contested environmental term that various groups used to reimagine a changing landscape, both on screen and in discussions about film. The term had already become a keyword for humans’ relationship with their environment, and in the Weimar era—in contrast to what 62 Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 8.

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followed—cinematic renditions of Heimat stood at the center of a contested and multivocal discourse. Weimar-era films about Heimat document changing landscapes, incite new changes to the land, and also create a forum for discussing environmental change. The first chapter, “Companions and Combatants (or, Hugs, Fights, and Bites): Curating Multispecies Environments in Die Geierwally” uses Anna Tsing’s recent reflections on storytelling and community in precarious times to approach the Heimat movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After establishing the foundation for my discussion of cinematic Heimat discourse, the chapter explores some of the complexities that arise when Heimat discourse is transmitted through the filmic medium. Before the advent of film, Heimat was already a concept used to navigate a changing landscape through literature. Wilhelmine von Hillern’s novel Die Geier-Wally (The Vulture Maiden, 1873/75) is embedded into discourses of modernity, society, and tourism within a specific and identifiable Alpine environment. When the story is recreated on film, the cinematic medium makes visible the interaction of the numerous actors and influences, both human and nonhuman, that share the screen. Key texts for the first chapter include von Hillern’s novel as well as film adaptations from 1921, 1940, and 1956. The analysis of these texts is informed by theoretical approaches from multispecies studies and material ecocriticism. New and remarkably different cinematic Heimat environments are considered in the second chapter, “From Industrial Heimat to Bavarian Heimatfilm: Sprengbagger 1010, Hunger in Waldenburg, and the Consolidation of a Genre.” Within the broader field of cinematic Heimat discourse, films that oscillate between rural scenes and industrial developments, or what I refer to as industrial Heimat films, serve as focal points for debates about landscape change. The chapter examines the 1929 films Ums tägliche Brot: Hunger in Waldenburg (For Daily Bread: Hunger in Waldenburg) and Sprengbagger 1010 (Blast Excavator 1010), and then briefly discusses Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son, 1934) within a broader consideration of Heimat discourse in the Nazi film industry. Additional context is drawn from theoretical and secondary sources on industrial film. The juxtaposition of idyllic scenes and industrial landscapes recurs throughout this chapter, whether in the traditional farming landscapes transformed into coal mines in Sprengbagger, an idyllic scene depicted on a homespun tapestry that cuts to documentary footage of a factory in Hunger in Waldenburg, or the famous dissolve between the Alps and Manhattan in Der verlorene Sohn. But while similar scenes appear in each film, the impacts and debates surrounding them vary widely. In the Weimar era, industrial Heimat films create a forum in which multiple perspectives on the environment converge. The final section of the chapter discusses how, after Weimar films had curated diverse visions



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of Heimat and fomented debate about environmental change, the film industry of Nazi Germany worked toward a specific vision of Heimat centered around idyllic, intact landscapes and cultures that would strengthen nationalist and racist propaganda goals. This vision aligned with NS-era environmental policy and was carried out through film journals and propaganda policies, not only through films themselves. As in the earlier industrial Heimat films, albeit in a very different sociopolitical context, these Nazi-era films and related texts work in tandem with, and catalyze, broader environmental processes. Whereas the first section of my book analyzes discourse, the second section turns toward infrastructure. Discourse might be understood as the cultural systems within which individual ideas emerge. Infrastructure is the material counterpart of discourse: it provides the material underpinning for visible systems that support human society. Both discourse and infrastructure are rendered visible by film in ways that were not possible in prior media. Infrastructure often goes unnoticed, simply supporting the structures or activities that are seen and knowingly used in daily life. However, the creation of new infrastructures can involve massive time, effort, and investment, and can be a site of fascination, regardless of whether the infrastructure in question is a train line connecting sites across a metropolitan area, an underground sewer tunnel, or the studio infrastructures that make possible the events seen on the movie screen. These infrastructures are forgotten once the activities they enable have become a part of everyday life, yet films can record and preserve the fascination inspired by their initial appearance. Further, by showing material worlds that can be curated but not fully controlled by filmmakers, environmental films can show ways in which both discourses and infrastructures are formed simultaneously by human and nonhuman interests and forms of agency. Chapter 3, “Infrastructure in the Anthropo(s)cene: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive,” introduces the framework for the second section of the book, drawing on secondary sources from infrastructure studies. Film operates in tandem with infrastructural developments: infrastructures are required off screen, shown on screen, and implied or creatively imagined as backdrop to the dynamic status of the filmic space. The medium of film serves as both visual archive and creative catalyst for infrastructure developments in the physical world. This introduction paves the way (to use an infrastructural metaphor) for a new analysis of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Despite its supposed status as a work of sciencefiction fantasy, Lang’s film serves as an archive for already-occurring environmental changes, particularly underground infrastructures. The focus on skyscrapers in most discussions of the film’s cityscape has distracted from this important element. Moreover, the film’s climactic flood serves as a reminder of the immense infrastructures that had to be created, and

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then maintained in working order, to create an image of infrastructural failure on screen. The film serves as a reminder that the cinema catalyzes—and also discloses or reveals—environmental processes that operate on a mass scale despite being hidden from view. Beyond Lang’s film and archival sources relating to it, the analysis draws on secondary sources on urban environmental history and infrastructure history. In chapter 4, “Image, Environment, Infrastructure: The Social Ecologies of the Bergfilm,” theoretical models of social ecology are used to consider the role of mountain films in the development of infrastructure in the Alps. For a century before the advent of film, literary texts and guidebooks played an important role in the development of Alpine tourism and the resulting expansion of tourist infrastructures. However, in film, far more than in written texts, infrastructures are integral to the medium itself. This fact illuminates a difference between the Weimar-era Bergfilme (mountain films) and the literary texts that preceded them: the engineer protagonists of Gustav Renker’s novels, which served as indirect inspiration for multiple Bergfilme, are sublimated into the aesthetics of Arnold Fanck’s Alpine films. Filmic space is inherently dynamic; the resulting experience of speed in a skiing film functioned within a growing enthusiasm for speed within the culture of ski tourism. The imagery of mountain films became part of the image projected by the growing ski industry, which in turn led to the growth of industrialized ski resorts, so that the sense of speed that was initially only available to most people on film became widely accessible on the ground, thanks to infrastructure developments that followed the films. The chapter analyzes Arnold Fanck’s well-known film Der heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain, 1926), as well as his lesser-known film Der große Sprung (The Great Leap, 1927) and Gustav Renker’s novel Heilige Berge (1921). The final chapter of part 2 returns from the mountains to Berlin, the city that has always been the center of the German film industry. In chapter 5, “Greenwashing in Black and White: Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, Die Stadt der Millionen, Menschen am Sonntag,” the analysis turns from the studio sets of Metropolis and the Alpine scenes of the mountain films to look a number of Weimar-era urban films—including experimental documentaries known as “city symphonies” as well as semidocumentaries that combine authentic footage with scripted dramatic plots—that build their filmic image of urban infrastructure out of the physical matter of the city itself. In the years leading up to these films, city officials in Weimar-era Berlin carried out ambitious projects to develop park systems and connect dense urban centers to peripheral nature areas. The films reflect, but also accelerate and multiply, the curation of environments already taking place in the non-filmic city. Whereas the mountain films discussed in chapter 4 reveal a compression of space to make distant peaks accessible, the city films show a compression of time that allows



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the dynamic events of the city, in which a building might transform completely over the span of a year, to be compressed into a few moments of film time. The dynamism of urban space becomes visible thanks to the ecological archive of film. The book ends with an epilogue entitled, “Welcome Back: Reflexive Environments in Recent German Cinema.” Given that German cinema is deeply embedded in environmental history, recent filmmakers have explicitly responded to past filmic landscapes. In this final chapter, the analysis returns to the notion of film offering a “welcome to the Anthropocene,” as discussed in the introduction. Returning to the introduction’s notion of a welcome drawing on Levinas and Derrida, this concluding chapter argues that film has always offered an unwelcome welcome. Self-reflexive environmental images in recent films make this process explicit. Phoenix, released in 2014 but set just after World War II, imitates various tropes from the postwar “rubble films.” But while the older films show the broad populace as victims working together to rebuild a ruined urban environment, Phoenix reveals the rubble as a site of ongoing German complicity in Nazi-era crimes. In another example, the experimental documentary Forst (Forest, 2005) displays a refugee home located in the forests around Berlin. Whereas 1950s Heimat films often featured postwar expellees finding a new home in the German forests and heaths, this film shows how unwelcoming those same environments can become when those seeking a new Heimat (home or homeland) are constrained to a Heim (institution or asylum) in the forest. These recent films lean into the cultural complexities of a film history that is inseparable from historical contexts that are not only social and political, but always also environmental. Together, the analyses throughout these chapters explore material complications and multispecies entanglements that are intrinsic to filmic environments. In its creative curation of material worlds, the Anthropo(s)cenic medium of film serves both as an archive for physical environments and ecological ideas and as a catalyst for changing landscapes. The chapters trace various paths by which filmmakers have directed, but never fully controlled, human and nonhuman bodies on screen, ultimately revealing an environmental story that has always been embedded within the political, social, and aesthetic histories of German cinema.

1: Companions and Combatants (or, Hugs, Fights, and Bites): Curating Multispecies Environments in Die Geierwally In this time of diminished expectations, I look for disturbancebased ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest.1 We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the flesh.2 “I’m not a head of cattle that has to get sold or promised to another at the master’s bidding. I mean, I get to give some input, when we’re talking about marriage!”   “No, you don’t, because the child belongs to its father just like a calf or a cow, and has to do what the father wants.”3 Between death and life (there is sometimes a vulture)4

I

The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing relates her searches for mushrooms in the forest as “pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.” These terrors include that “the world’s climate is going haywire, and industrial progress has proved much more deadly to life on earth than anyone imagined a century ago. The economy is no longer a source of growth or optimism; any of our jobs could disappear with the next economic crisis.”5 She suggests that, unlike in past moments, these concerns are shared across the population: “Precarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate. Now it seems that n her book

1 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 5. Emphasis in original. 2 Haraway, When Species Meet, 16. 3 In the original, this quotation is remarkable for the dialect as well as the multispecies imagery: “I bin kei Stück’l Vieh, das sich verkaufen oder verprechen lassen muß, wie der Herr will. I mein, i hätt au noch a Wort mitz’reden, wann’s ans Heiraten geht!” “Nein, des hast nit, denn das Kind g’hört dem Vater so gut wie a Kalb oder a Rind und muß tun, was der Vater will.” Von Hillern, Die GeierWally, 21. 4 Dooren, “Vultures and their People in India,” n.p. 5 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 1–2.

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all our lives are precarious—even when, for the moment, our pockets are lined.”6 Such fears not only result from environmental and economic changes, but also arise because people have lost “the handrails of stories that tell where everyone is going and, also, why.”7 Tsing’s comments serve as an introduction to her broad discussion of surviving within multispecies landscapes in “capitalist ruins,” as described by her title, using mushrooms as a case study of how species and communities adapt to catastrophic change. Despite Tsing’s book’s clear framing around issues of twenty-firstcentury environmental degradation, social flux, and resilience in the face of globalized industrial capitalism, it bears striking parallels to the concerns of Heimat activists in Germany a century earlier. Heimat literally means “home,” and as Germany’s landscapes and demographics shifted from an agricultural to an urban and industrial society and economy, Heimat activists (including writers, authors, and local history aficionados) sought to protect the landscapes and cultural practices that were dis­ appearing. In the context of Tsing’s book, as in the German texts and films discussed below, landscapes are at risk; economic shifts are causing people to fear for their known ways of life and livelihoods; the stories that had provided guidance for prior generations are disappearing. And like the Heimat activists of an earlier time, Tsing seeks refuge in the forest. While Heimat might be untranslatable and the concept’s problematic history is specific to the German-speaking context, precarity and a Heimatesque nostalgia are closely linked far beyond the German context. But the parallel must not be taken too far—for Tsing quickly makes clear that her book discusses mushrooms “to explore indeterminacy and the conditions of precarity”—it is not a “critique of the dreams of modernization and progress that offered a vision of stability in the twentieth century; many analysts before me have dissected those dreams. Instead, I address the imaginative challenge of living without those handrails, which once made us think we knew, collectively, where we were going.”8 Heimat discourse, in the German context, might be seen as a rush to the proverbial woods— and heath, and mountains—to try to reattach those handrails, even as the economic structures to which they had been attached were disintegrating. Tsing’s book emphasizes precisely the ways in which the stories humans tell influence the impacts they trigger on their environment; both Tsing’s examination of lifeways that proliferate at the “unruly edges” of capitalism and the present study’s examination of notions of Heimat that serve diverse social, political, and environmental purposes exemplify the “place for stories” that William Cronon asserts is a critical component of 6 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2. 7 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2. 8 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2.

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environmental history.9 The discourse on Heimat, and especially the role of film within that discourse, provides an example of how the material and cultural frames of environmental history are inevitably intertwined. Heimat films therefore mark an important phase in the development of German cinematic environments. After the rubble of the postwar years, the Heimatfilm genre of the 1950s presents an attempt to deliberately curate an intact human environment rooted in a sheltering natural world. Moreover, within the context of films and film discourse during the prior decades, Heimat emerges as a key term for contested environmental visions, of which the genre that was consolidated in the 1950s is only one possibility. In this way, within the present study’s material and environmental history of German film (following and supplementing Siegfried Kracauer’s psychological history in his classic book, From Caligari to Hitler), the discourse of Heimat within German cinema plays an important and complex role. To use terms favored by geographers, Heimat contrasts with the optic space of maps and graphic representation of landscapes, in that it emphasizes the experience of humans within an environment; it is inherently a cultural landscape or an example of what geographers call haptic space.10 Heimat films map the emotional experience of Heimat onto specific exterior and interior landscapes; they provide images for what (and where) Heimat should be, and set those images into motion as a filmic experience. The idea of what Heimat should be shifted in significant ways over the course of modern German cultural history. The words “Heimat” or “Heim” were common within place names during the time of Germanic tribes’ south- and westward migrations and became less frequent when the tribes became more settled. This onomastic trend illustrates that “those who have a ‘Heimat’ talk about it less.”11 Through the 1700s, the word “Heimat” referred primarily to property or geographic place of origin; then, during the nineteenth century, the word gained emotional undertones: it now called to mind a lost and better condition. This shift in meaning came at the same time that increased geographic instability—the product of industrial development, urbanization, and mobility through emigration or (military or colonial) adventure—was rapidly rendering obsolete the traditional notion of a rural homeland that remained stable over generations. Still, through much of the nineteenth century 9 Tsing, “Unruly Edges”; cf. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 61–64; Cronon, “A Place for Stories.” 10 On haptic and optic space in film, see Giuliana Bruno’s book, Atlas of Emotion. Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller discuss cultural landscapes of Heimat discourse and their differences to North American understandings of landscape; see Lekan and Zeller, “Region, Scenery, and Power,” n.p. 11 Von Bredow and Foltin, Zwiespältige Zufluchten, 24. For a book-length study of the history and meaning of Heimat, see Bastian, Der Heimat-Begriff.

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the term remained tied to local and regional identities, but from German unification in 1871 through the end of the Nazi era, national governments within a number of subsequent regimes succeeded in transferring the identification of Heimat to the national level, using the Heimat concept as an emotional tool to facilitate a sense of group identity within the new, abstract, modern nation-state of Germany.12 Since World War II, the Heimat concept has been viewed with suspicion due to its role in Nazi propaganda; moreover, after millions of Germans fled the advancing Russian army at the end of World War II and left their homes in what is now Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, the term became a keyword in “bitter debates between left and right in which right-wing, revanchist forces and refugee associations appealed to the lost Heimat in the East.”13 It has thus continued to serve a sense of German nationalism along with a sense of loss and resentment, similar to its use leading up to German militarism before the World Wars. But more recently, especially as Germany has welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees since 2015, some have called on the idea of Heimat as a way to foster a broader vision of German identity, even as others have claimed that these new uses of the term simply give new life to exclusionary implications that it has always carried. Given the term’s complex and fraught conceptual history, it comes as no surprise that the secondary literature on Heimat is vast and complex. At the most basic level, Heimat has been analyzed as a key term for thinking about space, community, and identity in German. It has been variously assessed as a key term for German identity whose complexity reflects the complex and troubled histories of German-speaking countries over the past two centuries,14 a vital space for shelter and social support that can serve marginalized as well as dominant groups,15 a political tool for building national identity in the abstract nation-state,16 a regressive space that lends itself to reactionary tendencies,17 and a key term in ongoing cultural discourses of place, identity, history, and memory.18 Recent discussions of Heimat have emphasized its significance for peripheral or marginalized groups and those experiencing precarity, as well as its

12 See Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, and Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor. 13 Boa and Palfreyman, Heimat, 11. 14 Boa and Palfreyman, Heimat, 1. 15 Greverus, Auf der Suche nach Heimat. 16 Applegate, A Nation of Provincials; Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor. 17 Blickle, Heimat. 18 Eigler, “Critical Approaches to Heimat”; Eigler and Kugele, Heimat: Intersection of Space and Memory; Moltke, No Place like Home.

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relevance for ongoing configurations of cultural identity against a backdrop of migration.19 In all of these iterations and interpretations, Heimat retains its status as a keyword for ideas about place, community, and identity: it serves as a conceptual tool for negotiating a changing environment. Already in novels of the Heimatliteratur genre from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cultural works attempted to erect new handrails and guideposts for cultural responses to environmental change. In cinema, the Heimat genre has explored and promoted specific relationships between human communities and their nonhuman environments, attempting to curate a variety of environmental visions over the course of German film and environmental history—but as discussed in the present volume’s introduction, the physical world resists full control by the filmmaking team. Given the recurrence of similar tropes and new adaptations of the same titles across numerous different epochs of German film, the Heimat genre offers a particularly productive object of study for film history in the Anthropocene, showcasing the dynamic tension between environmental film as a product creatively curated by humans and an ecological archive that reflects agencies beyond the filmmakers’ control. The Heimatfilm genre is best known for those films made during the 1950s, an era in postwar Germany marked by a long period of economic growth and conservative governments under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer, West German chancellor from 1949 until 1963.20 During the Adenauer era, Heimat films were by far the most popular genre and formed an enormous part of the German film industry in the 1950s, accounting for more than one fifth of all films premiered between 1947 and 1960.21 Adenauer-era Heimatfilme bear the reputation of being overly sentimental and having a concatenation of kitschy plots, idealized technicolor landscapes, and stereotyped characters. They are generally seen as prime examples of a reactionary escapism that marked West German culture in the 1950s.22 Typical characters of Heimatfilme include strong male figures such as farmers and village priests; prodigal sons who leave the farm for the big city, then realize the value of their homeland and return; beautiful farmers’ daughters who often rebel, but eventually submit to their role in patriarchal village society; and outsiders or poachers who threaten the stability of the rural community. These 19 Kathöfer and Weber, “Introduction: Precarity”; Cagle, Herold, and Maier, eds., Heimat and Migration. 20 Important book-length studies of the Heimatfilm genre include Höfig, Der deutsche Heimatfilm; Moltke, No Place Like Home; and Ludewig, Screening Nostalgia. A recent addition explores critical interventions by Jewish filmmakers throughout the history of the genre: see Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema. 21 Höfig, Der deutsche Heimatfilm, 166. 22 Moltke, “Evergreens,” 19.

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Figure 1.1.  From Die Geierwally (1956). DVD screen capture.

human characters are matched by typical visual and aural trappings that include (pseudo-)folk music, village festivals, traditional garb (Trachten), and frequent extended shots of the natural landscape, whether the northern German heath, the Bavarian Alps, or the Black Forest.23 Together, the harmonious human and natural elements form an image of Heimat that serves as an intact, sheltering refuge from the strife of modernity.24 Willi Höfig writes that postwar Heimat films were “in no way an invention of German and Austrian film production of the 1950s,” citing earlier trends in literature, theater, and film as important predecessors.25 The literary Heimat genre offers one notable starting point: a large number of Heimatfilme draw their plots from well-known novels,

23 For a concise discussion of Heimatfilm characteristics, see Moltke, “Evergreens,” 18; for a detailed analysis of these traits, see Höfig, Der deutsche Heimatfilm, 392–430. 24 This notion of Heimat-as-refuge has been thoroughly criticized in recent years. In film studies, an important example is Moltke’s study of the genre’s complex and often dark engagement with postwar German history in his book No Place Like Home. 25 Höfig, Der deutsche Heimatfilm, 143.

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especially the works of Ludwig Ganghofer and Ludwig Anzengruber.26 In this way, the specific past moment that inspired the films is not a real situation of intact rural life, but a literary phenomenon of rural nostalgia. The tradition of the Volkstheater—theater companies formed by farmers or working-class communities, in contrast to the bourgeois and aristocratic origins of institutions like the Hoftheater—also provided a foundation for Heimatfilme, since these rural theater companies had built an artistic genre around traditional stories and festivals. Further, the sets of rural theaters served as temporary film studios for on-location shooting, and Volkstheater also provided actors and producers for films.27 The popular Weimar genre of the Bergfilm formed another important predecessor in that Heimatfilm directors such as Luis Trenker and camera operators such as Sepp Allgeier, Hans Schneeberger, and Richard Angst all began their careers working on mountain films. Not only the people behind the camera but also the photographic style demonstrates continuity between Bergfilm and Heimatfilm: both focus to a great extent on the physical environment, blurring the line between narrative and documentary cinema. Indeed, Bergfilm director Arnold Fanck started out making documentary films about skiing and only added narrative plots when he realized this would make his films more commercially viable.28 Similarly, as Johannes von Moltke points out, Der Förster vom Silberwald (The Forester of the Silver Woods), a Heimatfilm from 1954, was first conceived as a documentary about the natural splendor of the Alpine forest and wildlife, but was then converted into a narrative Heimatfilm.29 In this and other 1950s Heimat films, long takes interrupt the narrative flow to display wildlife as a spectacle on screen: the filmmakers curate nature through the medium of Heimatfilm. In the various releases of Die Geierwally discussed below (from 1921, 1940, and 1956), as in the films studied by Moltke, the filmmakers attempt to create a deliberate, often idyllic, portrait of human society embedded into a natural setting. But as is emphasized throughout the 26 Höfig, Der deutsche Heimatfilm, 143. For the particular importance of Ganghofer’s novels as made into films by Peter Ostermayr, see Moltke, No Place Like Home, 37. 27 Höfig, Der deutsche Heimatfilm, 144. The importance of Volkstheater personnel to Heimatfilm productions had already been established in the Nazi era, for example in Hans Steinhoff’s 1940s production Die Geierwally, discussed below. See Claus, Filmen für Hitler, 423. 28 See Fanck, Er führte Regie, 125, 131. 29 Moltke, No Place Like Home, 86. As Moltke points out, the Austrian landscape is credited as a character at the beginning of Der Förster vom Silberwald. Fanck does the same, for example listing Mont Blanc in the credits of his 1934 film Der ewige Traum  / Der König vom Montblanc (The Eternal Dream  / The King of Mont Blanc).

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present study, the signifying power of the environment on screen extends beyond the capacity of the filmmakers to tightly control the stories being told through their films. This mismatch between artistic intention and managerial capacity might be insignificant in a tightly scripted fiction film created entirely in a studio, but within a semi-documentary genre centered around outdoor settings, it poses a larger problem. Nonhuman animals occupy intriguing and unstable positions within this process, in that they waver between being treated as dispensable objects within an environment, companion beings who function primarily in relation to human characters, and subjects who act independently of human intent; moreover, human filmmakers often cannot fully prescribe or predict which of these positions the animals will take.30 Nonhuman animals therefore provide an element of productive disturbance within the filmmaking process. For reasons that will soon become clear, the title discussed in the following pages presents a particularly productive example. The remainder of this chapter examines four different literary and filmic renditions of a tale initially titled Die Geier-Wally: Eine Geschichte aus den Tiroler Alpen (The Vulture Maiden: A Tale from the Tyrolean Alps). As its initial point of departure, my analysis takes note that even before the announcement of the tale in the subtitle, the main title combines two elements: a vulture and a human with the nickname Wally (short for Walburga). Moreover, the subtitle announces not only that there is a story, but also that it is situated in a specific geographic location and landscape. What little scholarship has been devoted to Die GeierWally (in literary and filmic form) has focused on Wally and her story. Given that a bird and a mountain landscape have equal prominence in the title to the human and the story, it seems worth exploring what new insights might arise by thinking about impacts, interests, and agencies beyond the human. This chapter therefore revisits the familiar landscapes of Heimat literature and film with the simple question: what happens if you take it seriously that the first and last words of this title are a bird and a mountain?

Multispecies Heimatfilm: Looking at—and with—Animals Die Geier-Wally, both as a Heimat novel and as a perennial title of the Heimatfilm genre (in 1921 under the same name, thereafter as Die Geierwally, without the hyphen), displays the interplay of diverse humans,

30 Paul Sheehan discusses the ability of animals to disrupt or elude filmmakers’ efforts at manipulation and control in his essay “Against the Image.” See also Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image, 193–252.

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nonhuman animals, and material agencies.31 Throughout the process, this particular exemplar of the Heimat literature and film genre is remarkable in that it not only embeds a story of human activities into specific natural and cultural environments, but it also places human and nonhuman animals side-by-side—evidenced already in its title. The novel and films therefore offer a fruitful case study for exploring ideas of environmental change arising through agency that is distributed between human and nonhuman animals, living and non-living matter. Viewed in this context, Die Geier(-)Wally reveals film’s role in extending Heimat as a multispecies discourse that straddles the boundary between cultural idea and material fact. Donna Haraway writes of humans’ interactions with nonhumans that “we are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the flesh.”32 In her book When Species Meet, she blends together highly visible macro-level examples of species interacting, most famously the exchange of saliva, microbes, and DNA when she kisses her dog, with the micro-level interactions of species (with gut bacteria being perhaps the most prominent example) that make up any individual animal. Haraway introduces Jacques Derrida’s lecture “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” as a text that raises important questions that arise through Derrida’s reflections on interactions between himself and his cat, but that fails to take its topic seriously in key ways: “with his cat, Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning.”33 As an alternate model, she introduces Barbara Smuts, a bioanthropologist who, when embarking on a project studying baboons in Kenya, was advised “to be as neutral as possible, to be like a rock, to be unavailable” so that the baboons would behave as if she were not there.34 But through her work and conversations with other primatologists, “Smuts recognized that the baboons were unimpressed by her rock act. They frequently looked at her, and the more she ignored their looks, the less satisfied they seemed.”35 She began behaving differently so that the baboons came to recognize her as a participatory subject with whom they could communicate and interact comfortably; as a result, Smuts declares that “the baboons remained themselves, doing what they always did in the 31 The title Die Geier-Wally translates literally as “Vulture Wally” or “Wally of the Vultures.” The name Wally is short for Walburga, the story’s female protagonist. I have followed some past English translators in opting for the less awkward English title The Vulture Maiden. 32 Haraway, When Species Meet, 16. 33 Haraway, When Species Meet, 20. 34 Haraway, When Species Meet, 23. 35 Haraway, When Species Meet, 24.

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world they always lived in.”36 At this point, Haraway declares, Derrida and Smuts each have something to offer each other: Smuts embraces the intersubjectivity across species that Derrida fails to consider, while Derrida suggests that both the human and nonhuman might be changed by the encounter; their temporalities overlap, rather than leaving the nonhuman in a temporal world governed only by evolution, whereas humans exist in “history, where all other sorts of time come into play.”37 Attempts to decenter humans in discussions of subjectivity or agency do not always follow such charismatic or traditionally companionable species as dogs, cats, and baboons. In Die Geier-Wally, the companion species announced in its title are human and bird. Recent literature offers examples for these partnerships as well: in a memoir describing her life as a falconer, Nancy Cowan writes repeatedly about building relationships or partnerships, about herself and a bird getting to know each other.38 While the idea of “getting to know each other” suggests an anthropomorphic view of the bird, this is perhaps unavoidable—some have suggested that anthropomorphism is the “default condition of the human mind,” so rather than avoiding it altogether, the task is to arrive at a “critical anthropomorphism” that “can adequately account for its powerful operation in human minds and cultures, and persuasively analyze the relationship between, on the one hand, anthropomorphic representation and perceptions of nonhuman beings, and, on the other, the minds and emotions of these beings themselves.”39 Cowan’s depiction of human-animal partnerships carries out this process of projecting human perception and interactions onto nonhumans, and then explicitly naming the gap at which identification and similarity break down. In so doing, she directly counteracts Haraway’s critique of Derrida, writing about a falcon on the very first page of her prologue: “She sees . . . what does she see?” While the paragraph goes on to describe Cowan’s work training the falcon and uses anthropomorphic metaphors (chasing Cowan’s lure, the falcon “drops and weaves like a skier descending a steep slope”), she nonetheless sets out to understand the world as it is seen through nonhuman eyes.40 The relationship between art and animals can be interpreted (following scholars such as Haraway and Timothy Morton) in terms of enmeshed, associative agency or co-becoming.41 However, perhaps the most predictable relationship would be one of instrumentalization and 36 Haraway, When Species Meet, 25, quoted from Smuts, Sex and Friendship in Baboons, 295. 37 Haraway, When Species Meet, 25. 38 Cowan, Peregrine Spring. 39 Welling, “On the ‘Inexplicable Magic of Cinema,’” 81. 40 Cowan, Peregrine Spring, xv. 41 Timothy Morton describes the notion of a “mesh” as an apt metaphor for ecological entanglements. Morton, Ecological Thought, 28.

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projection, and numerous scholars have demonstrated how animals on film have been portrayed in a way that maximizes profits and reflects dominant social values, with little or only secondary regard for scientific accuracy or conservation.42 A more neutral approach might see animals within literature or film as a chance for imagining new possibilities: “Literature helps us imagine alternatives to the way we live with animals, and animals help us imagine a new role for literature in a world where our animal future is uncertain.”43 As one introduction describes the various approaches being pursued by scholars of animal studies, “some seek to recover lost perspectives; others work to ignite creative thinking and artistic sensibilities regarding other living beings; and many work through one or more of the impressive sciences that our species has nurtured. The upshot is that today a great variety of people who think other animals are important in and of themselves now share their unique vision of how best to study other living beings.”44 And yet, there are limits: one key task of such scholarly work is to ask, “how we can recognize the nature of, and accept, the obvious limits as to what humans might know about other living beings?”45 Employing an animal studies lens to literature aims to offer a path toward greater recognition of creative and mundane activities, both human and nonhuman. Within film studies, the arguments tend to be somewhat less optimistic. Animals are often seen as disposable; real animals can be killed on screen to signify simply imaginary or symbolic deaths that might befall fictional human characters.46 At the same time, the presence of nonhuman animals on film serves as a “particularly powerful index of the real” even as cultural meanings of animals multiply into the realm of open-ended signifiers.47 In Die Geier-Wally, there is clearly a symbolic discussion to be pursued: on the one hand, a vulture is linked to themes of exile, freedom, and companionship in the wild as an alternative to human society; on the other, a bear is killed and serves as a symbol of nature’s strength that is conquered by a heroic human.48 But in the midst of all of these ascribed meanings, on film, a live vulture flies and hops beside the female film star. The bird, as a decidedly non-Anthropos within the Anthroposcene 42 See, for example, Mitman, Reel Nature, 3 and Bousé, Wildlife Film, 1. 43 Robles, Literature and Animal Studies, xi. 44 Waldau, Animal Studies, xii–xiii. 45 Waldau, Animal Studies, xiii. 46 McMahon, “Film,” n.p; Bousé, Wildlife Films, 42. 47 McMahon, “Film.” Jonathan Burt critiques past studies that have reduced the status of animals in film to that of “an overly free-floating signifier.” Burt, Animals in Film, 27. 48 See Georg Seeßlen’s discussion of “The Bear and the Eagle: Love and Rage,” in which he suggests that the animals play an important role in the film’s symbolic language. Seeßlen, “Die Geierwally.”

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of cinema, yet also a decidedly living being, demands attention as a species no less than a spectacle. In a novel, the animals might help build up the discourse of Heimat by providing nonhuman occupants within idyllic or threatening visions of nature; but in film, these discourses are re-­ materialized and cannot be contained simply by their literary implications. Moreover, genre titles such as Heimatfilm and Bergfilm display a land prejudice; they seem to suggest that the landscape of home or mountain is the guiding nonhuman element of the film; but by setting the human side-by-side with a nonhuman animal already in its title, Die Geier(-)Wally emphasizes that there are animal agencies beyond the human at stake. Film thus becomes a new kind of Heimat discourse. In its ability to curate plots and environments that bring together landscapes and animals within a human-designed narrative, with nonhuman animals acting and seeing on screen (not only being seen and acted upon), film serves as the multispecies medium of Heimat. The remainder of this chapter examines in detail how this process of curation, drawing from the discourse of literature and then extending through the medium of film, develops in renditions of Die Geierwally ranging from the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries.

Die Geier(-)wally Die Geier-Wally was first published serially by Wilhelmine von Hillern in 1873, then in the form of a novel in 1875, and was first made into a film by E. A. Dupont in 1921. It was adapted again in the Nazi era (Hans Steinhoff, 1940) and during the 1950s Heimatfilmwelle (František Čáp, 1956), and has seen further adaptations in recent decades (Walter Bockmayer, 1987; Peter Sämann, 2005). The story provides evidence of the continued appeal of the rural mountain farming milieu within literature and film, regardless of the genre designation.49 Yet as each form of the story indicates, Heimat is not a constant idea or environment across time: each iteration treats the tale differently, resulting in varying relationships between humans, nonhuman animals, and their rural environment. Some attention has already been given to the political significance of the films.50 I am interested here in filmic environments, and I argue that each version serves as a useful record of an imagined relationship between 49 Since the Heimatfilm genre had not yet been standardized, the earlier films are described in various terms: reviews call Steinhoff’s film “the first genuine peasant film” (“Die Geierwally,” Film-Kurier, August 16, 1940) and Dupont’s “a chamber play (Kammerspiel) from the mountains” (“Die Geierwally,” FilmKurier, September 14, 1921). 50 See, for example, Bechtold-Comforty et al., “Zwanziger Jahre und Na­tio­nal­sozialismus,” 33–67; Claus, Filmen für Hitler, 433–34; Ashkenazi,

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individual humans and nonhuman animals, between human society and the surrounding environment, or, more broadly: between the human Heimat and the multispecies environment within which it is embedded. Specific elements of the plot change with each remake, but the basic contours remain constant. The story is set near Sölden in Austria’s Ötztal, a region of the Tyrol near the Italian border that contains some of Austria’s highest and most remote mountains.51 In Die Geierwally, the titular character Walburga, nicknamed Wally, is the daughter of the Höchstbauer (highest farmer) Stromminger, a mountain farmer who is one of the valley’s wealthiest landowners. Wally is strong in both will and physique, as demonstrated early in each film when she climbs down or is lowered on a rope to capture a baby vulture from its nest. The bird becomes her companion and the source of the nickname Geierwally or “Vulture Wally.” Although proud of his daughter’s physical strength, Stromminger has no patience for her stubbornness. Equally stubborn himself, he demands that she marry the farmer Vinzenz, a weak, sycophantic, and in some versions devious character who nonetheless loves Wally and refuses to give up hope of winning her hand. Wally, for her part, has no interest in Vinzenz, for she loves the hunter Joseph, known locally as Bärenjoseph (bear-Joseph) after he shoots a bear that has been killing local livestock. Joseph is the strongest man and best shot in the valley, which irritates the formerly dominant Stromminger. Enraged at his daughter’s refusal of Vinzenz and infatuation with Joseph, Stromminger sends Wally up to the high mountain pasture or Hochalm. When she returns to the valley after several months, Wally finds that her father is sick and has given Vinzenz control of the farm. Seeing Vinzenz abusing an old servant, Wally hits Vinzenz on the head, then sets fire to the barn and flees. Finally, after another long period of exile, Wally learns that her father has died and she now has control of the farm. She returns home and runs the farm effectively and fairly. Meanwhile, Joseph has adopted Afra, an orphaned female relative from a neighboring valley. Misinterpreting Joseph’s relationship with Afra to be romantic, Wally insults Afra out of jealousy, and in retribution, Joseph arranges a prank to humiliate Wally during a village festival. In her anger at this public shaming, Wally tells Vinzenz to kill Joseph. She later repents and is able to save Joseph. Finally, Joseph and Wally come together. Despite the rather convoluted plot, a few very simple motifs drive this story: the high Alpine setting, the tension between a strong-willed girl and her stubborn father, the story of love obsessively sustained through hardship, and the conflicts over love and property within the clearly Anti-Heimat Cinema, 47–60; cf. Scharnowski, “Escaping from Heimat and Longing for Heimat,” 51. 51 The Ötztal region’s biggest claim to fame in recent history is that it also contained, until 1991, the remains of the famed “ice man” Ötzi.

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defined roles of a (narratively and cinematically imagined) traditional Alpine village community. Finally, the title already indicates that Wally is not alone: woman and vulture operate together as companion species. The variations that each remake brings to these core elements, the ways in which they are represented visually, and the changing resonance of the story’s human, nonhuman, and non-living bodies within different social, political, and geographic contexts, allow a fruitful environmental analysis across time. Social Animals and Alpine Environments: Anna Stainer-Knittel, Wilhelmine von Hillern, and Die Geier-Wally Die Geier-Wally is very loosely based on the life of the Tyrolian painter Anna Stainer-Knittel, who captured two baby eagles from their mountain nests when young and later married against her parents’ wishes. Von Hillern likely encountered Stainer-Knittel’s Selbstbildlis im Adlerhorst (Self-Portrait in the Eagle’s Nest) while visiting a museum in Innsbruck.52 But beyond the initial inspiration for the story, Stainer-Knittel served only “superficially” as the model for the heroine in Von Hillern’s novel.53 Tyrolian author Hans Haid goes so far as to write that the whole novel is rooted in the Ötztal, a valley about fifty kilometers south of the Lechtal, which is famous for some of Austria’s highest peaks and most spectacular Alpine scenery. Von Hillern chose the Ötztal as the setting for her novel; only the vulture-capturing episode is linked to Stainer-Knittel and the less extreme landscape of the Lechtal.54 In its subsequent filmic adaptations, the tale’s diegetic landscape remained in the Ötztal, but the location used for filming drifted further, ranging from the Bavarian Alps near GarmischPartenkirchen, to authentic sites in the Ötztal, to the Karwendel range near Innsbrück.55 The story of Anna Stainer-Knittel’s climb down to an eagle’s nest had already inspired artistic and literary adaptations before Wilhelmine von Hillern published her novel, most notably in the self-portrait by StainerKnittel herself and a short narrative account, “Das Annele im Adlerhort” (Anna in the Eagle’s Nest) by Ludwig Steub.56 But of the prior works, with an eye to the impacts on film, Die Geier-Wally is the primary source 52 Scharnowski, “Escaping from Heimat and Longing for Heimat,” 45. 53 Scharnowski, “Escaping from Heimat and Longing for Heimat,” 43. 54 Haid, “Die Geier-Wally,” 86. 55 Hajner, “Die neue Geierwally Hütte am Hafelekar,” n.p. 56 For an overview of earlier textual and visual representations inspired by Stainer-Knittel’s eagle-capturing feats, see Kain, “Anna Stainer-Knittel,” and Stainer, “Anna Stainer-Knittel und die Geier-Wally.” Numerous later adaptations followed; in addition to the films, the most famous is the opera La Wally by Alfredo Catalani.

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of interest. The novel is the best-known work of Wilhelmine von Hillern (née Birch), born in Munich in 1836 as the daughter of Charlotte BirchPfeiffer, a successful actress, author, and theater director, and Dr. Christian Birch, a theater critic.57 Wilhelmine Birch spent her early childhood in Zürich, then moved to Berlin when she was eight years old. Remarkably for an author whose best-known work is seen as a classic of Heimat literature, she was miserable during her early life near the mountains in Switzerland, and only found satisfaction when she entered the cultural circles of Berlin. She “thrived in this new and interesting life,” taking in conversations of the artists and authors who surrounded her family at the center of the cultural scene in the new German capital.58 During her late teenage years and early twenties, she pursued a short but successful career as an actress.59 But after marrying the theater critic Hermann von Hillern, who was nearly two decades older, she abandoned her acting career and moved from Mannheim to Freiburg im Breisgau, where her husband was given a new government position. Beyond the difficulties of abandoning her successful career and being in a much smaller city after growing up with the vibrant cultural scene of Berlin, she was now treated with suspicion by the local conservative Catholic community due to her Protestant faith and her young life as a modern professional woman in the metropolis.60 It was within this strained social context that she took up writing. Her writing career began with novels dealing with social tensions in the city; Maire Walshe describes this first period under the heading Gesellschaftsromane (society novels). These early works contrast against the rural setting of the Dorfgeschichten (village stories) from von Hillern’s middle period. Die Geier-Wally (1875) is the first of these rural tales. Die Geierwally has received significantly less scholarly attention than the works of other Heimatliteratur authors such as Ganghofer, despite its status as one of the most popular Heimat novels.61 When discussed, it is usually dismissed as an unimportant work of popular literature that prepared the way for more noteworthy works in other media: One article about Alfredo Catalani’s opera La Wally laments the composer’s interest in von Hillern’s work, describing it as an act of desperation in the

57 A dissertation by Maire Walshe serves as a key resource for information about von Hillern and Die Geier-Wally. In particular, see this work for a concise overview of von Hillern’s biography, a detailed account of von Hillern’s early life, and a biographical reading of the novel Die Geier-Wally in relation to von Hillern’s own struggles as a female author. Walshe, “Wilhelmine von Hillern,” ii, 23–65, 165. 58 Walshe, “Wilhelmine von Hillern,” 30. 59 Walshe, “Wilhelmine von Hillern,” 46. 60 Walshe, “Wilhelmine von Hillern,” 54. 61 Scharnowski, “Escaping from Heimat and Longing for Heimat,” 42.

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composer’s old age.62 Ofer Ashkenazi’s recent analysis gives nuanced attention to the films directed by Dupont (1921) and Steinhoff (1940), yet it dismisses the novel as “a classic and notoriously kitschy Heimat novel by Wilhelmine von Hillern.”63 In the scant scholarly literature on the novel, themes of gender and feminism have yielded some of the most significant insights. Uta Ganschow describes the novel as an example of the glorification of female submission, despite the strong female title character.64 But as Maire Walshe has demonstrated, von Hillern’s initial draft of the novel featured a tragic ending; there was no reconciliation between the heroic Walburga and her repressive community. Von Hillern’s male readers and editor demanded she change the ending to give resolution and integration of Wally into the village community, and she regretted the compromise.65 Walshe argues that the female protagonist’s doomed struggle for self-assertion lies at the core of the novel.66 Extending on Walshe’s discussion of feminist themes in the novel, Susanne Scharnowski argues that “unlike many other texts of a genre that often idealises being embedded in a rural Heimat, von Hillern’s novel presents a much more modern perspective on Heimat—which may . . . be one of the reasons for its enduring success.”67 The way in which this “modern perspective” is applied to specific environments changes with each new literary or filmic rendition; it therefore merits attention within a study of the ecological archive of German cinema. Despite its setting in a traditional farming community, many of the core themes of Die Geier-Wally center around questions of female emancipation and freedom as they come into tension with norms for social roles and family relationships.68 In this way, the novel builds on the Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Black Forest Village Stories) of Berthold Auerbach, to whom von Hillern dedicated her novel. Auerbach’s stories were bestselling texts in the nineteenth-century German literary market that drew in part on the appeal of regionalism to portray seemingly authentic local color in the midst of encroaching modernity and demographic shifts, while simultaneously using tales situated in this seemingly 62 Klein, “Alfredo Catalani,” 292. 63 Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema, 42. 64 Ganschow, “Die Geier-Wally,” 69; cf. Walshe, “Wilhelmine von Hillern,” 162. 65 Walshe, “Wilhelmine von Hillern,” 159. 66 Walshe, “Wilhelmine von Hillern,” 165; cf. Scharnowski, “Escaping from Heimat and Longing for Heimat,” 49. 67 Scharnowski, “Escaping from Heimat and Longing for Heimat,” 42. 68 Because of social themes prominent in discussions of modern society, Susanne Scharnowski describes von Hillern as “clearly an urban author,” a trait she has in common with Ludwig Ganghofer and in contrast to Berthold Auerbach. See Sharnowski, “Escaping from Heimat and Longing for Heimat,” 44.

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regressive setting to carry out critiques of contemporary society and politics. The Jewish Auerbach and female von Hillern both wrote from marginalized positions within the literary marketplace, yet found ways to embed critique within popular written forms.69 For von Hillern, the project of situating pressing contemporary social concerns in a rural setting was a deliberately chosen element of the novel. The work originally bore the title “Die Dorfbrunhild” and arose, at least in part, through discussions with professor Otto Funke regarding the aesthetics, settings, and impact of literary works. Von Hillern argued that the tragic core of a work could be transposed to any location: “Do you believe . . . that the farm girl, who stands on the manure pile with pitchfork in hand and defends her innocence, is not just as poetic to me as Brunhilde in her splendid armor? It’s not just a matter of the outer appearances in which the sublime element of human nature shows itself; that is not determined by clothing or social status.”70 In seeking the “sublime element of human nature,” von Hillern argues that the setting and material elements are incidental; based on this background, the rural and Alpine setting of her novel might be arbitrary. Yet the fact that she chooses a high Alpine setting, one of the core regions in which Kant locates the greater-than-human experience of the sublime, seems quite well chosen to suit her emphasis on the sublime within human nature.71 Die Geierwally succeeded in convincing urban readers of its rootedness in a specific location. One London reviewer wrote that while urban lives are “more and more crushed into uniformity,” von Hillern’s novel exhibits “the charm of ‘local’ novels,” in that it depicts peasants who are “the product of the soil they live upon, that gives them their distinctness.”72 This review shows how von Hillern’s novel had tapped into the appeal of Heimat narratives—as well as seemingly authentic and local rural narratives within a globalized literary marketplace—in the midst of demographic shifts toward urban centers. The novel emphasizes its embeddedness in its (newly selected) location in the first words of the novel: “Far down in the depths of the Oetz valley (Ötztal), a traveler (ein fremder Wanderer) was passing. On the eagle heights of the giddy precipice above him, stood a maiden’s form, no bigger than an Alpine rose when seen from below, yet sharply defined against the clear blue sky,

69 For discussion of political critique in Auerbach’s tales, see Bunyan, “Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten,” 131–34. 70 Walshe, “Wilhelmine von Hillern,” 150. 71 For a discussion of the novel’s landscapes and the heroine’s emotions in relation to Kant’s notion of the sublime, see Scharnowski, “Escaping from Heimat and Longing for Heimat,” 47–48. 72 “Elsa and her Vulture,” 561–62.

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the gleaming ice-peaks of the glacier.”73 The reader soon learns that the hiker is accompanied by a guide; from this beginning, information about Walburga’s family is given by this local guide who leads the visiting traveler through the mountains. Susanne Scharnowski rightly points out that the reader’s gaze is to some extent aligned with Wally’s, looking down on the local guide and the hiker from high above, so that the hikers and the mountains are seen together as part of a tourist landscape.74 At the same time, the opening of the novel—beginning in the transition between the first two sentences—repeatedly switches perspectives between the highangle gaze from Wally’s position above and the low-angle return shot from the hikers below, suggesting that the reader is given a perspective more akin to the viewer of a film, for whom the perspectives—visual as well as narrative—can be varied in order to provide an all-encompassing view of a scene. The novel suggests varied lenses that will be realized on film decades later, and in a similar vein, it prepares the way for multispecies groupings that will share the screen. The first sentences contain the same mix of human and nonhuman elements as the novel’s title. The mountain valley is foregrounded in the first phrase; the human is introduced as being fremd, meaning foreign or out of place. In the next sentence, the location (where Wally is standing, the reader will eventually learn) is described as “eagle’s heights”—so throughout the first sentences, the mountain setting and nonhuman inhabitants are foregrounded; humans are introduced as outsiders, as in the alien or foreign hiker, and are described as shapes or forms and compared to nonhumans, as in the phrase, “a maiden’s form, no bigger than an Alpine rose,” that is used to introduce the heroine in the second sentence. Later, the local guide is introduced as a “chamois-hunter” (Gemsjäger) and he describes the girl above with the words: “That is certainly the Vulture-Maiden” (“Das is g’wiß die GeierWally”).75 He is described based on the animal he hunts, and Wally is described based on the animal she lives with: both are defined in relation to interactions with other species. The contracted word “g’wiß” introduces dialect into the language of the novel, suggesting that the geographic and social setting from which the guide emerges plays a role in his word choice and pronunciation. One 73 Von Hillern, Die Geier-Wally, 4. For the analyses in this chapter, English translations are adapted (with slight modifications for clarity) from the translation by Bell and Poynter, available online through Project Gutenberg. See Bell and Poynter, The Vulture Maiden. 74 Scharnowski, “Escaping from Heimat and Longing from Heimat,” 44. 75 Von Hillern, Die Geier-Wally, 4; Bell and Poynter, The Vulture Maiden. For this quotation as well as the next one, I include the German text as well as the English translation, since the English text does not attempt to convey the German quotation’s imitation of a regional dialect.

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page later, another line of dialogue adds further complexity to the multispecies assemblage with which the novel begins. Describing Wally to the hiker, the guide states: “Spröd sei sie wie a wilde Katz und so stark, dass die Buab’n behaupten, ‘s könn’ sie keiner zwinge—wenn ihr einer z’ nah kommt, schlagt s’ ihn nieder. No—wann I emal ‘nauf käm, I wollt’ sie zwinge, oder I riss mer selber ‘n Gamsbart und d’ Feder vom Huat!” (She is as shy as a wild cat, and so strong that the boys declare no one can conquer her: if one of them comes too near, she knocks him down. Well, if ever I went up there after her, I’d conquer her, or I’d tear the chamoistuft and feather from my hat with my own hands).76 The emphatic use of dialect establishes a distance between these spoken sentences and the standard German text that surrounds them, already suggesting through language that the speaker is embedded into his Alpine landscape. On top of this linguistic foundation, multispecies metaphors abound: the guide describes Wally’s emotional brittleness not in relation to her harsh family upbringing (with which he is likely familiar, given his awareness of her reputation) but rather by comparison to a wildcat; then, when asserting that he would be able to conquer her by force, he writes that if he proved unable to do so he would tear out the parts of other animals that adorn his hat. Of course, the surface meaning of these lines suggests that the embattled and restrictive gender roles bear parallels with the violent and hierarchical relationship between hunter and prey. But by situating this tale of social strife in a rural setting, von Hillern re-literalizes these metaphors. The hunter kills animals, “die Geier-Wally” lives with a vulture, and responses of care, fear, or violence arise with similar frequency within human–human and human–nonhuman interactions. The opening paragraph of the novel thereby creates not only a set of visual perspectives that lends itself well to filmic adaptation, but also a multispecies network that, when acted out on screen by human and nonhuman animals together, creates new complexities that are physical as well as visual, affective as well as instrumental, and that create bonds and wounds that cannot be constrained within the diegetic world of the film. Not only the location is changed in the novel, moving from StainerKnittel’s original location in the Lechtal to the more extreme Ötztal. The bird is also replaced, substituting a Geier (vulture) for the Adler (eagle) described in Steub’s narrative and Stainer-Knittel’s self-portrait “im Adlerhorst” (in the eagle’s nest). This change may not have been intended to indicate a different species, since the two words were used somewhat interchangeably in the nineteenth century.77 And, of course, 76 Von Hillern, Die Geier-Wally, 5; Bell and Poynter, The Vulture Maiden. 77 In response to being asked why the 2005 TV movie Die Geierwally used an eagle rather than a vulture, lead actress Christine Neubauer replied: “there was never a vulture; that’s just the normal word in the Tyrol, where birds of prey are

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eagles are also scavengers. But there is significance to the choice, especially because von Hillern’s original description of her heroine as “Die Dorfbrunhild” would seem to call for a heroic animal companion. In fact, reintroducing the eagle as a vulture offers several new points of resonance in the narrative. Thom van Dooren documents various ways in which vultures are fascinating and often misunderstood animals. While there are numerous species of vulture and the evolutionary relations between species are still being sorted out, a number of shared traits are relevant for the place of the vulture in Die Geier(-)Wally. They rarely kill animals for food, suggesting that the fear and urge to kill the vulture at the outset of the tale is misguided, a red herring response to a farmer’s fear of losing animals through other causes. Indeed, vultures are “tightly bound into human geographies of carcass production”:78 the vulture has likely built its nest because the farms and villages frequently provide animals that are already dead, providing vultures with the chance to clean up the carcasses. The vulture is probably seen as a threat because of its size—they are among the largest flying birds. But, in fact, their size is directly linked to their role as scavengers, in that they have evolved to be able to ascend on updrafts and then soar over vast distances while expending minimal energy. They are adapted to search for dead animals, gorge themselves when they find them, and then live on stored fat for long periods of time. These adaptations have the simultaneous effect of making them clumsy flyers, lacking the speed and agility of powered flight that would be needed to catch their own prey. In consequence, the visuality of a vulture, which makes it appear both threatening within the diegesis and visually appealing as a character within a film, is exactly that which prevents it from posing an actual threat. Finally, vultures rely on sight and social interaction to find food: they have strong eyesight that allows them to find new carcasses while soaring high above, but they also watch for other vultures and gather in social groups to guide each other toward sustenance that they might not find alone.79 So by misreading the vulture as a threat and killing the parent, then taking the baby out of its social milieu and limiting it to the company of one human, the narrative provides an animal that is misunderstood, excluded from its social habits, and isolated, just as is the human protagonist. The vulture’s visuality remains, but the only living being it gets to gaze upon is Wally: the Adler has become a Geier, which in turn has become the Wally-Geier.

all grouped together under the word ‘vulture.’” Hillgruber and Neubauer, “Der Heimatfilm erlebt eine Renaissance,” n.p. 78 Dooren, Vulture, 46. 79 Dooren, Vulture, 37–38.

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The disruptive force of animals in literature becomes more significant on film. In each filmic adaptation, the vulture—and sometimes other animals as well—is seen, and sees, alongside the human actors on screen. E. A. Dupont, 1921 E. A. Dupont’s 1921 film Die Geier-Wally was the first production of star actress Henny Porten’s newly formed company, and Porten described her satisfaction in having secured “one of the best directors of the day” for the job.80 The sets were also extremely well looked after, with Paul Leni as art director. Regarding the on-location shooting in the Bavarian Alps, Porten recalls Leni busily gathering traditional regional clothing and sketching locations to be replicated later in the studio. As in the later mountain films and remakes of Die Geierwally, the mountain scenes were largely filmed outdoors—however, the Bavarian Alps near GarmischPartenkirchen substituted for the much less accessible Ötztal region.81 The film was a commercial success and drew enthusiastic cheers from the audience at its premiere, a fact that author and journalist Kurt Pinthus attributes above all to the star cult surrounding Porten rather than to the film.82 Notably, one reviewer describes the mountain village milieu to be overused and tedious, which Johannes von Moltke takes as evidence that motifs now associated with the Heimatfilm genre were already well established in 1921.83 Beyond familiar outdoor tropes of the later Heimat genre, the main thrust of this review is that it is the designed sets, not the mountain setting (nor Porten’s star cult), that allow for the film’s success: But the genius of the film is named: Paul Leni. What this truly productive designer made out of the few hackneyed motifs is amazing. One cannot bear to see any more Tyrolean farms, peasant huts, outdoor dances, or village inns. Nothing about them is pleasing to the eye. Leni grasps the task much differently. He does not construct his spaces realistically (naturalistisch), but rather uses given elements to create the spirit of these spaces.84

This reviewer suggests that the film indeed relies on spatial elements, as expected of the later Heimatfilm genre, and Moltke’s observation is accurate in that the comment suggests a fatigue with on-location rural images evocative of a Heimatkunst atmosphere. But within this particular film, 80 Belach, Henny Porten, 72. 81 Belach, Henny Porten, 73. 82 Pinthus, “Henny Porten als Reichspräsident,” cited in Belach, Henny Porten, 82. 83 Moltke, “Evergreens,” 20. 84 Review from LichtBildBühne, cited in Belach, Henny Porten, 79.

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the reviewer claims, the most successful use of space is the deliberately imaginative locations created in the studio, not the authentic space of the mountains. The description above indicates that the film carried forward the practice, already present in von Hillern’s novel, of using elements that can be marketed as authentically “Alpine” or Heimat-esque, but multiplying them for mass impact and entertainment. The mountain scenery is important for the film’s visual impact, but by relocating from the distant Ötztal to the Bavarian Alps just south of Munich, the film team could gain much easier access to the mountains at lower cost. Further, Leni’s prominence is critical, in that the traditional clothing, buildings, and other cultural products of the mountain farming setting play an important role in conveying authenticity, but for the film to be effective, they must be replicated in a studio, since the camera technology of 1921 did not allow on-site interior shots. Leni’s importance is reflected in the fee he earned for his work on the film: at 100,000 marks, he received more than anybody involved in the film other than Porten and director Dupont.85 Indeed, aside from Porten, all of the actors together were paid 130,000 marks;86 the fact that Dupont’s fee is only 30,000 less than the total budget for all supporting actors combined shows that the filmmakers recognized that the nonhuman environment would be among the primary elements responsible for the film’s success. As in all of the Geier(-)Wally adaptations, the film’s supposedly authentic presentation of the Alpine landscape is both multiplied and resisted by the film’s nonhuman participants. Yet throughout much of Dupont’s film, the vulture who shares the title is remarkably absent. In its place, numerous other animals exert influence on the trajectory of the film, whether intentionally or independent of the film team’s goals. The result is a film that, despite its status as the first picture produced by and for “the first German film star,”87 appears not only as a cinematic commodity but also as a multispecies spectacle. In the 1983 reconstruction from the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, the vulture is seen from the very first sequence. The secondary literature tends to ignore this fact; as one example, Ashkenazi’s discussion of the opening scene focuses only on Wally’s place within a forbidding landscape, with no mention of the vulture.88 And yet, immediately after the opening credits, the first shot features Wally sitting with the vulture 85 Belach, Henny Porten, 77. 86 Belach, Henny Porten, 76. 87 Porten’s status as the pioneer of the star system in the German film industry explains the subtitle of Belach’s biography, Henny Porten: Der erste deutsche Filmstar. 88 Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema, 44.

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atop a rocky crag. In an eye-level long shot lasting seven seconds, the rocky outcropping rises from the bottom of the screen like a pedestal; meanwhile, the vulture is positioned on the lap of Porten (as Wally) so that the two seem to merge as a single moving body within what is otherwise a static landscape shot. The importance of the protagonist(s)— both human and vulture—is emphasized in the cuts that follow. We next see a long shot showing two hikers cautiously traversing down a steep, boulder-­strewn landscape. The image cuts back to Wally and her vulture, this time in a medium shot that shows both human and bird in greater detail, again at eye level and with more landscape details visible on the mountains behind. The human and bird look at each other as Porten seems to embrace the bird on her lap. With the direct and closer shots, and with human and bird gazing at each other, these two beings seem to be a self-sufficient entity, comfortable in their own bodies and landscapes, and deserving of the attention of others. The next cut shows the two hikers, shown within a circular mask on the left side of the frame, looking up into the distance, followed by the first intertitle of the film: “Das ist die Geier-Wally vom Stromminger . . .” (That is the Vulture-Maiden of the Stromminger family). Wally and the vulture are set linguistically and visually as equal co-protagonists that together are worthy objects of attention, both for the hikers in the film and the viewer of the film. The hikers then wave their hands and call out. Wally presumably hears their call; she stands, waves, and calls back, seen from a slightly low angle and cutting from a long shot into a closer view. This sequence carries out a visual alternation between the hikers’ view directed up at Wally and the vulture, and their view from on high looking down at the hikers, similar to the content of the novel’s opening paragraphs. But the surrounding context from the novel is erased. In the book, the narrator describes the guide’s disparaging remarks about Wally’s lack of femininity, while Wally imagines the guide below to be her beloved Joseph. But in the film, this discursive content is erased; the scene is displayed only as the multispecies spectacle of human and vulture on a rocky summit, and with the process of viewing carried out on screen by the hikers below. This prologue is followed by an intertitle announcing, “How the Geier-Wally got her name.” Shortly thereafter, a sequence shows Wally’s descent and her fight with the adult vulture, which she kills with a knife before being pulled back up, together with the baby vulture, by the men waiting above. While this sequence is the inciting incident for the plot and leads to Wally’s nickname and the film’s title, it is carried out with a fake vulture, attesting more to the artistry of the film’s props than to the presence of nonhuman animals in the film. In Ofer Ashkenazi’s recent analysis of Dupont’s film, his discussion of the vulture centers exclusively on this scene of Wally’s fight against the bird. Ashkenazi claims that Wally is not threatened and has no clear reason to kill the bird, leading him to

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Figure 1.2.  Human and avian co-protagonists in the opening scene of Die Geier-Wally (1921).

diagnose the scene as a “bloodthirsty attack” by Wally against the vulture, thus illustrating the violent tendencies within the seemingly idyllic Heimat and forming part of Dupont’s critique against Heimat clichés.89 In fact, the same violence is included in von Hillern’s novel, and the violence is justified in the same way in both the novel and the 1921 film: the vulture is seen as a threat to the local farmers, but none of the boys in the village dares to climb down and get rid of the bird, so Wally’s father boasts that his daughter will do the job. Even before she descends, her job is to kill the vulture. There is certainly an embedded critique of the harsh and violent life of the village, but Wally is not the source of the violence. Rather, it stems from accepted behavior regarding vultures and from the stubborn pride of Wally’s father: it is a critique against patriarchal and ecophobic power structures generally, rather than against any specific violent traits shown by Wally. To understand how the film establishes relationships between humans and their nonhuman companions, it is helpful to consider the scenes in which nonhumans actually appear in the film. The live bird is limited to the opening sequence, in which it seems to look at Wally and be looked at by both Wally and the hikers below. The later sequence showing the fight 89 Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema, 54.

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against the vulture suggests a different way of being with animals: while the opening shots include a live nonhuman participant who engages in the visual action of the film, the later sequence includes a simulated animal only as an attacked and defeated object. Moreover, the vulture does not appear again—whether as live animal or puppet—after these opening sequences, which conclude just over eight minutes into the film lasting nearly two hours. Thereafter, the vulture is only heard about as an epithet, for example when Wally is turned away while looking for work or shelter: as she is refused entry, the intertitles show the exclamation, “Geier-Wally!” In this case, the bird is absent, so the connotation is only metaphorical. The hyphenated Geier- suggests that the vulture is seen as a stain on the reputation of the human character. The bird seems to have shifted to a different role, functioning merely as a comment on the human protagonist. But the opening shots suggest something different: because the vulture shares the screen with, and indeed is first seen on the lap of, the human film star, and because the bird is engaged in a sequence of looks extending in multiple directions involving humans and nonhumans together, the opening sequence suggests a set of multispecies relations that is not fully reducible to the diegetic and metaphorical functions to which the vulture is later reduced. While the vulture soon disappears from view, other animals take over to carry this approach forward through the end of the film. An early scene on the farm includes a small dog who almost seems to be on screen by accident, wandering idly, scratching itself, and lying down in the bottom left corner of the frame. The dog’s cheerful motions contrast starkly with the slow ponderous acting of the human characters, since Wally has just learned that she is banished to the Hochalm (high-altitude pasture) and is lamenting her fate to a servant. When Wally seeks shelter at Rofen, a high-altitude settlement that held special privileges to grant asylum for those fleeing persecution, the residents are alerted to her presence by a dog running back and forth in front of the farmhouse, rather than a vulture tapping on the house window (as in the novel and later films). In these shots, the dog seems to fill the role of a vulture in the novel and in the later films, and, indeed, a production still shows the filmmakers posing on a mountain slope with a dog, rather than a vulture, as the one nonhuman group member.90 Other animals feature prominently as well: in one sequence, Joseph captures an escaped bull, shown in a series of brief shots featuring real interactions between man and animal. In something reminiscent of Tom Gunning’s notion of the cinema of attractions,91 this sequence derives its interest from the sheer physicality 90 This photo is reprinted in Belach, Henny Porten, 73. 91 Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions.” Gunning’s formulation provided a convenient term for what Noël Burch and a number of other scholars of early

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of the event. The sequence with the bull is already present in the novel but, once again, the importance of nonhuman elements within the story is emphasized by their prominence within the film’s budget: the film crew purchased the bull for 14,000 Marks, one of the largest expenses aside from the payments for cast and crew. The bull was then resold for just 5000 Marks only three weeks later. The loss in price was justified with the argument that the bull had deteriorated during the filming process and could now only be sold for slaughter.92 Whether or not this reason was valid, the issue of the bull serving multiple functions in service of humans, but also disrupting expectations based on its changing ability to fulfill diverse roles, shows that not only human activities are in control in the filmmaking process. The bull creates a major spectacle or “attraction” within the narrative, but also a significant expense, a detail listed with displeasure in accounts of the film’s production. Further, the fact that its work on film might have led to its slaughter indicates that while animals might have agency, they still exist within speciesist hierarchies; they are still deemed expendable.93 Through all of these shifting roles, the bull exemplifies several typical elements of filmic depictions of nonhuman animals, in which the depiction and roles of animals have “far less to do with science or real outdoor experience than with media economics, established production practices, viewers’ expectations, and the ways each of these influences the others.”94 Whether through the blending of human and nonhuman gazes in the opening sequence, the role of nonhuman animals as both spectacle and trigger for plot development, or the materialist importance of nonhuman bodies revealed through production expenses, the 1921 adaptation of Die Geier-Wally reveals itself as a work in which filmic spectacle arises through the entanglement of the visual and the physical, subject to the shared and entangled agencies of the human and the nonhuman. Hans Steinhoff, 1940 Michael Shrubb’s history of the human use (and abuse) of wild birds relates the diverse ways that they have been used for food, feathers, or skin and valued as caged birds or pets, scientific specimens, and prey animals for hunting.95 Intriguingly, none of these seems to apply to the novel and 1921 film—the bird’s parent is first killed with a knife, in a scene far cinema had observed regarding the force of attraction that popular media and circumstance share with cinema. 92 Belach, Henny Porten, 77. 93 McMahon, “Film,” n.p.; Bousé, Wildlife Films, 42. 94 Bousé, Wildlife Films, 1. 95 Shrubb, Feasting, Fowling and Feathers.

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removed from standard hunting tactics, and thereafter, the baby seems to accompany Wally as a companion, cage-free. In 1940, the bird’s treatment changes: the adult is hunted, and the baby is caged. These changes seem to align with new modes of interacting with animals that are favored under the entertainment regime of Nazi Germany. Yet once again, even as it is exploited, the animal resists being fully controlled. Instead, boundaries between vulture and human comprise one of many imagined borders that are emphasized in the film. As I will discuss below, the film’s interest arises in no small part through the way these social, physical, and environmental boundaries are repeatedly policed and transgressed. This obsessive and conflicted emphasis on boundaries adds nuance and complexity to, but by no means contradicts, the film’s role as an environmental spectacle in service of fascism. When Hans Steinhoff directed a new adaptation of Die Geierwally in 1940, the fascist regime of Nazi Germany was plunging headlong into an aggressive war of expansion and its entertainment industry had already been fully restructured under Joseph Goebbels as propaganda minister. It would therefore be easy to read Steinhoff’s film as a new vision of the Geier-Wally tale, reimagined as an instrument of propaganda. To some extent, this interpretation is convincing. The hostile patriarchal authority represented by Wally’s father is overtaken by younger male figures who seem to exhibit Führer qualities, the mountain farming milieu is portrayed with a fascination that reflects blood-and-soil racist ideologies, and Wally also takes on a clearer role as a self-righteous fighter against villains who could be seen as representatives of various cultural, political, or racial others as defined by Nazi ideology.96 But to focus primarily on the film as propaganda would miss the point of Nazi cinema’s role as a purveyor of distractions and softly packaged ideologies that created an illusion of normalcy within a state built around fanatic emphasis on nationalist unity paired with ruthless violence against dissent. Film functioned within the Ministry of Propaganda’s efforts “to discipline distraction”; it served as a powerful tool for convincing people to play along, and the escapism of light, comedic, or idyllic films formed a crucial part of the program.97 The fact that Steinhoff’s film effectively fulfilled this role can be deduced from the fact that it was particularly successful in occupied territories, 96 For interpretation of Steinhoff’s Die Geierwally as a work of propaganda, see Bechtold-Comforty et al., “Zwanziger Jahre und Nationalsozialismus,” 38–43. Horst Claus critiques some of these claims as ahistorical; see Claus, Filmen für Hitler, 433–34. Ashkenazi discusses the film as not necessarily a piece of propaganda, but as a work that clearly resonates with various Nazi ideological and political goals; see Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema, 56–59. 97 Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion, 16. See also Jacques Ellul’s discussion of “sociological propaganda” in Ellul, Propaganda, 63–70.

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where it offered a premodern pastoral fantasy amidst a present moment of forced subjugation.98 The 1940 film features the vulture much more prominently than the 1921 adaptation; moreover, it was filmed on location in the Ötztal and used traditional dress from nearby Heimatmuseum collections. All of this was done at great expense within remote Alpine regions of Austria (which had been taken over by Nazi Germany a year before production began), even as Germany was beginning an aggressive war against its neighbors in other directions.99 Showing authentic landscapes, emphasizing local material culture, and displaying members of the local population as actors and extras exemplified the racist ideologies that saw Alpine farmers as particularly pure racial types.100 In Steinhoff’s film, the blood-and-soil ideology that underlies Nazi glorification of mountain farmers manifests itself through plotlines and conflicts that imply deeply rooted, rigidly defined, and violently policed relations and boundaries between humans and nonhuman animals. The initial fight between Stromminger and Joseph offers a prime example. In von Hillern’s novel, the fight begins as a simple boasting match. Stromminger is jealous of the attention that Joseph is receiving after shooting a bear, and when he hears somebody say that Joseph has inherited his strength and skill as a hunter from his father, Stromminger jumps in and boasts that Joseph’s father was no match for him. Stromminger attempts to contrast his strength against that of the much younger Joseph, but in the ensuing altercation, it becomes clear that his static understanding of the structuring binary of strength-versusweakness fails because it does not take into account the dynamic processes by which bodies change over time. Although the fight, as portrayed in the novel, adds complexity to Stromminger’s simplistic notion of how bodies exist over time, it remains a comparison of just two people: strong and stronger, old and young. In Steinhoff’s film, the argument is structured around a much broader set of claims, still relating to bodies but this time not limited to the human realm. The fight begins because Stromminger’s jealousy over Joseph’s hunting exploits leads him to declare: “Your father was a poacher!” The question becomes not merely about one’s own physical prowess, but the ability to manage and grow resources on a broader scale. The accusation of poaching is intended to negate the value of

98 Seeßlen, “Die Geierwally,” n.p. 99 Filming on location required new electric systems in the town of Sölden and kilometers of electric wires in order to reach the higher-elevation region of Obergurgl, which at the time could only be approached on foot. See Claus, Filmen für Hitler, 424. 100 See Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema, 56 and Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 40–41.

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Joseph’s hunting prowess because, so it is claimed, his skills fall outside the boundaries of acceptable human-animal interactions. Earlier in the same scene, Joseph sees Wally perched on the roof of a shed. He calls up to her that sensible girls sit down below on the benches, and then calls her “Geier-Wally”—the first time this name is heard in the film. As Joseph makes these remarks, he is sitting with a large group of men at a table beneath the roof of the shed where Wally is perched (fig. 1.3). Joseph’s comments are heard during a long take that begins with a low-angle shot looking up at Wally; the camera then tilts down to show Joseph at mid-range, and finally tracks backward away from Joseph to ultimately reveal the entire table below, Wally alone above, and the mountains behind, just as Joseph pronounces his final mocking insult in the name “Geier-Wally.”101 Spatially, she is separated from the others and is described as being outside of the category of “sensible girls,” and then the point is intensified when he gives her a nickname that aligns her with the vulture.102 Once Joseph has pronounced his insult based on Wally’s forbidden transgression of the boundaries between species, the men laugh, and a servant from Wally’s own household reiterates the impact: “Did you hear? He cursed at you and called you ‘Geier-Wally!’ You bring us all to shame!”103 What the men have only indicated through their mocking laughter, the servant says explicitly: Wally’s interspecies boundary-crossing is a mark of shame. And yet, throughout the 1940 rendition of Die Geierwally, it is the crossing of boundaries that provides much of the visual interest through the actions of both humans and vultures. While Wally’s initial climb is seen as inappropriate within the diegesis, given the female human body she inhabits, it is absolutely appropriate as a filmic endeavor, creating a mix of authentic climbing stunts, cross-cutting action and suspense, and even moments inspired by the aesthetics of crime or horror films as Wally fights off the giant bird with a knife (fig. 1.4). During Wally’s travels in and out of the village, the vulture is repeatedly seen entering and leaving a tall wooden cage, tapping on windows as Wally seeks refuge after fleeing her farm, or attacking Joseph during his visit to Wally’s hut on the mountain. Even the final sequence of the film, in which the vulture supposedly is set free—for as the servant Klettenmayer remarks, Wally no longer needs the vulture now that she has Joseph—the visual interest depends 101 The long tracking shot ends with the configuration seen in figure 1.3. 102 Wally’s climb down to capture the vulture is seen in an earlier sequence. In this version, Joseph has first-hand knowledge of the event, since the film shows Wally struggling under the attacks of the adult bird as she tries to take the baby; she is saved when Joseph shoots the bird from below. 103 In the original: “Hast du g’hört? ‘Geier-Wally’ hat er dich g’schimpft! Nichts als schämen muss man sich mit dir!”

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Figure 1.3.  Wally perched above the crowd. Die Geierwally (1940).

on the bird’s relationship with humans. With its wings still visibly clipped but no longer preventing it from flying, the vulture offers a final visual signifier of a body that can cross between different spaces and can seem to re-enter the realm of wildness, even as its clipped wings will surely lead it to return to the accustomed shelter in the company of humans. With all its narrative emphasis on borders, hierarchies, and authority, it is the spectacle of boundary-crossing and species-mingling that creates the final appeal. This is not to say that the film is an act of resistance: instead, the breakdown of the film’s overt messaging only enhances its role as entertainment for the masses both in Germany and in occupied territories seeking distraction into a fantasy realm, where harsh human society and seemingly pristine nature can intermingle. František Čáp, 1956 The 1956 remake of Die Geierwally was a Peter Ostermayr production. Ostermayr’s monopoly hold on the stories of Ludwig Ganghofer assured him a lion’s share of the successes from the Heimatfilm boom of the 1950s.104 Ostermayr was already well established long before the 104 Moltke, No Place Like Home, 36.

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Adenauer era; his work with Heimat motifs first arose through early landscape films in the 1910s and continued with narrative films throughout the Weimar and Nazi eras.105 Further, Ostermayr invested in high-quality cinematography and directing; his stamp offered an assurance of quality production values that caused some critics of the genre to temper their negative views when discussing Ostermayr’s films.106 Of course, this did not offer any assurance of innovative techniques or engaging scripts: Ostermayr’s name became synonymous with the predictable rural storylines and conservative or escapist ideologies that were the hallmarks of 1950s Heimat film. Die Geierwally, produced in 1956, is no exception. Using color for the first time to capture the story’s spectacular settings, director František Čáp (also known by the name Franz Cap) once again brought the film crew to the Austrian Alps for on-site filming. But this time, the focus shifts away from the Nazi-era obsession with authenticity of the mountain farmers and their Alpine terrain. Instead, the mountain scenery is from the Hafelekar mountain, a peak in the Karwendel range just north of Innsbruck. The same site had been used for Luis Trenker’s 1931 film Berge in Flammen, and tourists can now visit a newly reconstructed Geierwally Hütte (Geierwally cabin) that was erected in 2016 as an exact copy of the cabin used in the 1956 film.107 Unlike the 1940 film’s exaggerated conflicts centered around the policing of interspecies and intra-societal boundaries, the conflicts in this postwar Heimatfilm are muted to emphasize reconciliation, guilt, and caring. This altered emphasis lends itself well to the sociopolitical interpretive framework that has guided much of German film studies. At the same time, the environmental aspect also demands attention: the film’s conflicts are repeatedly staged—and in contrast to the 1940 film, negotiated and revisited in search for compromise and reconciliation—in connection to human-animal relations. The exchange between Wally and her father quoted at the top of this chapter is drawn from Wilhelmine von Hillern’s novel. In the 1956 film, the dialogue is altered slightly, with substantial implications. When her father orders her to give up her interest in Joseph and marry Vinzenz, she objects: “I mean, I get to give input too. After all, I’m not a head of cattle that has to get sold at the farmer’s bidding.” Her father’s reply: “The child belongs to the father, just like a calf or a horse.”108 Unlike in 105 Moltke, No Place Like Home, 36–37. 106 Moltke, No Place Like Home, 36. 107 For discussion of the hut within a blog about tourism in Innsbruck, see Hajner, “Die neue Geierwally Hütte,” n.p. 108 I include the German original here, since the language may be of interest to readers. In the film, little remains of the dialect-inflected phrases of the

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the book, where she protests that she cannot be promised or sold without her consent, in this film, “verkaufen lassen” (being sold) is the only verb used. Meanwhile, rather than a calf or a cow (Rind), the father compares a child to a calf or a horse. Being sold is the only form of transaction, suggesting an even more unfeeling and abusive view of father-daughter relationships than the book. Still, the comparison is altered to mean something different: the sale of beef cattle implies slaughter, whereas the sale of a calf likely implies (at least for the short term) further growth, simply on a different farm. With a horse, the relationship gets even more complicated, since a horse would likely be used to perform work and is an animal that is more likely to be seen as a companion. I will not belabor the point in this opening dialogue, since at the core it is still an exchange in which an abusive father claims ownership over his young-adult daughter. But the slight reframing even within this exchange indicates a shift: in transactions involving people and animals alike, this film seeks outcomes that allow continued coexistence. The social conflicts of the film are carried out through animals, but without the emphasis on rigid boundaries from the 1940 film. When the prospect of a relationship between Wally and Joseph is first mentioned, it takes place in a conversation between Joseph and a hunting companion. Joseph states that he is interested in Wally, but as a hunter, he is not of a high enough social class to satisfy Wally’s father: in the hierarchy that gives Stromminger his dominant position in the village, ownership of domesticated animals is favored over the skilled pursuit of wild ones. When Wally argues with her father, she has not yet captured the vulture and gained her nickname. Instead, while hiking up to the high cabin where she will live in exile, she passes Joseph, who has just shot the adult vulture. Wally learns that there is a baby that has been left behind in the nest, so she later returns to the cliff where the nest is located in order to rescue the orphaned baby vulture and keep it as a companion. The killing of the parent is not part of the plot, and the film suggests no harsh judgment of Joseph for it. The whole foundation of the plot derives from different economic and affective approaches to animals: the father’s animosity toward Joseph arises from his classist notions that a farmer, who owns land and domesticates animals, is superior to a hunter, who manages and sometimes kills wild animals but does not own them. Meanwhile, Wally is introduced from the beginning as being motivated by care. Whereas in all the prior versions her initial climb was first and foremost an attempt to get rid of an animal viewed (with or without justification) as a threat,

novel: Wally asserts, “ich mein, ich hab doch auch noch mitzureden. Ich bin doch kein Stück Vieh, das sich verkaufen lassen muss, wenn der Bauer will.” Her father replies: “Das Kind gehört dem Vater, so gut wie ein Kalb oder ein Ross.”

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in this film her very first interactions are with an abandoned and helpless baby bird. The element of care, and of humans being nestled within a sheltering landscape, creates a sense of an idyllic Heimat refuge that for the first time aligns with stereotypes of the Heimatfilm genre. In contrast to Steinhoff’s frequent shots of humans midway up steep mountain slopes, Čáp’s rendition frequently displays images of the horizontal meadows or mountain streams at the bottom of the valley, as seen in figure 1.1 near the beginning of this chapter. When Wally rescues the baby vulture, there is no fight, and there are no other humans straining to pull up the rope. Instead, she lowers herself down once she learns of the abandoned bird, and after she has arrived at the nest and swooped up the young vulture in a cloth, the film leaves it to the viewers’ imagination how they make the ascent back to the cabin. While this portrayal might create some new gaps in the narrative, it successfully realigns the tale away from the emphasis on action and suspense and toward an insistent focus on social support and caring interspecies relationships (fig. 1.5). Later, when Wally and the vulture are walking together in search of refuge, the vulture often enters the frame first, giving the sense of an equal relationship between human and nonhuman animals. And at the end of the film, the bird is given the last image: the film closes with a low-angle shot looking up at the flying vulture. (The 1940 film has a similar shot near the end, but returns to a close-up of the happy couple for its final image.) All of these editing choices in the 1956 film point toward a more equal relationship between species: the bird is cared for and seems to share the screen as an equal. As the film goes on, Wally’s caring interaction with animals gradually extends to the other characters, including, to some small extent, her father. This change is most visible in the scene at Rofen. In Steinhoff’s 1940 film, Wally’s father pursues her to Rofen, and is then terrified by the Klotz brothers who live there and are protecting her. When the brothers emerge from their farmhouse, towering threateningly over the old man, he suffers a sudden health breakdown and is carried away on a sled, never to recover. In the 1956 rendition, this transaction takes a very different course. Immediately after Wally is brought into the farmhouse at Rofen to recover, the older brother, Benedikt, visits her father to negotiate an agreement: Since his estate has the right to protect those who are persecuted, he calmly encourages Wally’s father to leave her be, and gives the assurance that she will stay at Rofen and will not return home as long as her father survives. When he negotiates this arrangement, Benedikt travels between two crippled bodies: Wally is in bed recovering from extended exposure to the elements in her search for refuge, and her father is in bed due to gradually failing health. All of these negotiations are built on an effort to provide care and reconciliation, starting with Wally’s rescue of the vulture, extending through the care shown for both Wally and her

Figure 1.4.  Violent fight with the vulture in the 1940 rendition of Die Geierwally.

Figure 1.5.  Wallly’s gentle rescue of the baby vulture in the 1956 film.

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father when they are weakened, and continuing all the way to the implausible conclusion in which Wally, Joseph, and even Vinzenz are all able to recover physically and forgive each other for past transgressions (including attempted murder). With humans as with animals, the film seems to suggest, the moral imperative of the narrative is to negotiate and give care in order to find reconciliation and aid recovery. Whether children or horses are sold is ultimately not the core concern of the film; rather, the film’s central issue is whether they are cared for and whether their conflicts are resolved and forgiven. This change is explicitly articulated near the end of the tale. After she has incited Vinzenz to try to kill Joseph, Wally tells the local priest that she is thinking of committing suicide. He replies that killing herself would not provide a solution to her troubles, and when she asks what she should do instead, he replies: “You can atone. That’s nobler than dying.”109 Beyond the obvious focus on repentance, guilt, and reconciliation, this line helps bring into focus what has changed in the 1956 film vis-à-vis prior renditions. Neither of the earlier films had included this line. In von Hillern’s novel, the priest’s advice is different: “You can live, and suffer. That’s nobler than dying!”110 In the 1956 film, suffering (leiden) is no longer the goal. Instead, in response to Joseph’s broken body, just as has been done with numerous human and nonhuman animals throughout the film, the goal is care and resolution. But the film’s explicit assertion of care belies trouble that cannot be fully contained. Within the plot, the tidy resolution of all conflicts is unconvincing after two hours of abuse and intolerance. At the extradiegetic level, even more goes wrong: Despite her self-identification as a protector and lover of animals, lead actress Barbara Rütting fell victim to repeated bites during the shooting of the film. Clearly, while vultures are not a threat to humans or healthy livestock under normal conditions, this fact does not apply to the situation of sustained close contact between vulture and human required for them to co-star in a film. Then, three years after the film was completed, the vulture was killed by a hunter in the region.111 The professed sheltering Heimat holds water neither within the film world nor in the Alpine reality that is reflected on screen. Meanwhile, Wally’s small Alpine cabin is now visited by tourists and 109 “Sühnen kannst du—das ist mehr als sterben.” The literal translation is that atoning is “more than dying”; I have followed Bell and Poynter’s translation of this phrase as “nobler than dying,” since it better captures the idiomatic meanings of the German text. 110 “Leben kannst und leiden, das is mehr als sterben!” Von Hillern, Die Geier-Wally, 125. 111 The painful incidents during and after production are related in the text “Vom Buch zum Film,” included in the 2017 DVD rerelease of the film. Bayan, Die Geierwally, n.p.

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serviced by gondola rides up from Innsbruck. As Salman Rushdie comments on The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s comment that “there’s no place like home” is thoroughly unconvincing.112 This observation is no less true in this film, with its continually bubbling conflicts and stifling social milieu, than in Dorothy’s Kansas, with its drab humdrum existence in contrast to the splendor of Oz. The sheltering and conciliatory multispecies environment desperately pursued in Die Geierwally cannot hold violence at bay, whether in the material world or in filmic fantasy. At the same time, as Johannes von Moltke has discussed, “no place” might in fact be the best way of truly describing “home” or Heimat, since “its ostensible singularity is all too easily reproduced, . . . it is nothing but an illusion, or . . . it exists only as ‘no place’—a utopia.”113 What Die Geier(-)Wally adds to the numerous depictions of (failed) Heimat on film is an explicit foregrounding of multispecies interactions. The various films attempt to control, constrain, or curate the interplay between species, with some success. But while vultures may not actually be a threat to livestock, they can bite actors. So even though Heimat might be “no place,” sharing the sound stage with a vulture can get a bit cozy.

Conclusion: Heimatfilm as Anti–Wildlife Film? The conclusion of Die Geier(-)Wally reverses some of the expectations that it establishes at the outset; in consequence, it also reverses tropes of nature film more broadly. In the conclusions of the films and novel, Wally’s father dies and, at least in some renditions, the vulture flies away. In other words, after beginning with an orphaned bird and an exiled woman, the story ends with an orphaned woman and an exiled bird. At the end of the 1940 and 1956 films, the bird is looking down while soaring on high, emancipated or divorced from its previously supportive human companion. Seen at this distance, the vulture’s role as an observer becomes more explicit—but it has already embodied this role earlier in the plot as it accompanies Wally on her travels and travails against gender norms and failed romance. As such, the film reverses the expected relationship in wildlife films. The vulture watches human social activities staged as spectacle. Cynthia Chris points out that wildlife films have “an almost-always present preoccupation with sexual behavior, reproduction, difference, and norms. This preoccupation has taken a variety of forms, first focusing most intensively on the exuberant masculinity and exemplary femininity of human protagonists in expedition travelogues in the early days of

112 Moltke, No Place Like Home, 3. 113 Moltke, No Place Like Home, 3.

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cinema.”114 In Die Geierwally, this process is less satisfying: the drama of human gender norms remains unsettled at all but the most superficial levels of plot development. The happy ending is, as Georg Seeßlen notes (drawing from Billy Wilder), a “Notausgang” (emergency exit),115 a resolution required by the genre but not justified within the logic of the film. Meanwhile, rather than humans watching animals perform normative sexuality, Die Geierwally brings in a vulture who watches the humans execute their exuberant and rebellious gender performances. Gregg Mitman argues that wildlife films “seek to reproduce the aesthetic qualities of pristine wilderness and to preserve the wildlife that is fast vanishing from the face of the earth” at the same time as they “promise enlightenment and thrills simultaneously.”116 Heimat films try to show nature within an urbanizing society, but most of their interest is on the exaggerated dramas played out by the humans in their seemingly natural rural communities. Wally’s vulture often sits on the sidelines as a spectator or hobbles along as a co-traveler. This visual relationship between species inverts some of the tropes that might be familiar from wildlife films, which, according to Mitman, show a desire “to both be close to nature and yet distinctly apart,”117 reflecting the tensions that William Cronon diagnoses in his influential essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness.” While Mitman and Cronon both focus on environmental discourses within a North American context, their relevance for the present chapter is made clear at the end of Cronon’s essay, when he proposes that “home” might serve as a preferable alternative to “wilderness,” since the latter term insists on a strict separation between humans and nature, whereas former considers human inhabitants and built structures alongside seemingly natural landscape features, thus opening the door to more sustainable relationships.118 Die Geierwally suggests, contrary to Cronon’s assertion, that “home” might be no less troubled of an idea than “wilderness.” The twin protagonists named in the title highlight these troubles: the vulture’s strained connection with its own wildness mirrors Wally’s ambivalent relationship with her Heimat. The interaction of various species in Die Geierwally comprises one way in which German film has given rise to filmic Anthroposcenes that overlap and interact with the non-filmic world. The films align with many expectations from Heimat discourse and film, but the complication of a vulture as co-protagonist interrupts expectations. Moreover, the various renditions of Die Geierwally show that the tensions between filmic 114 Chris, Watching Wildlife, ix. 115 Seeßlen, “Die Geierwally,” n.p. 116 Mitman, Reel Nature, 3. 117 Mitman, Reel Nature, 4. 118 Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” 89.

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curation and nonhuman materiality can resonate differently in different moments, ranging from the spontaneity of Weimar-era cinematic spectacle, to idyllic worlds that might appease but also suggest alternate realities to viewers in countries occupied by Nazi forces in the early 1940s, to disturbances that complicate an emphasis on peaceful healing in the postwar era. While the natural world certainly fulfills and sometimes heightens the filmmakers’ desired effects, it also exhibits a complexity that is inherent to the Heimat concept and that is exacerbated by the unpredictability of the nonhuman animals and objects captured on screen. The next chapter pursues this line of analysis within a markedly different realm of Heimat discourse within film, namely the overlap of rural idylls with the rapidly industrializing landscape of the Weimar era. Even if Heimat is a utopia, as the visions of pristine nature within the Heimatfilm genre might try to suggest, the next chapter explores new and perhaps unexpected ways in which it overlaps with very real and dynamic German landscapes.

2: From Industrial Heimat to Bavarian Heimatfilm: Sprengbagger 1010, Hunger in Waldenburg, and the Consolidation of a Genre

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of Die Geierwally show that the same story, remade in various historical moments, can evoke a range of relationships between humans, nonhuman animals, and their environments in diverse configurations that all might be considered within the visual discourse of Heimat. The discussion now turns to two films from the late Weimar era and one from early in the Nazi era that all situate Heimatesque rural sites against urban or industrial landscapes and delineate the relationships between these various environments. While they would not have been described within the genre of Heimatfilm at the time of their release, taken together, they provide insight into trends and tensions within the concept of Heimat before it became solidified in the postwar era as a genre of rural nostalgia. Moreover, when considered within a broader field of filmic discourse that includes filmmakers, critics, and viewers, these films show a shift within the ecologies of Heimat imagery (following Ivakhiv) from an environmental keyword tied to diverse and dynamic environments and discourses, toward the backwards-looking cultural norm that marks the clichéd image of Heimat from the 1950s.1 The films discussed in this chapter sit at the conceptual boundary between the Heimatfilm and industrial film genres, a seemingly contradictory combination that nonetheless recurs with remarkable frequency. Industrial films can be defined as “films made by and for the purposes of industrial and social organizations” and scholars have proposed that they need to be studied in different ways from conventional fiction and documentary films: “Far from constituting self-sufficient entities for aesthetic analysis, industrial and utility films have to be understood in terms of their specific, usually organizational, purpose, and in the very context of power and organizational practice in which they appear.”2 In place of the auteur theory that often guides film analysis, Thomas Elsaesser proposes that he various productions

1 Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image, 32. 2 Hediger and Vonderau, “Introduction,” 10.



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scholars examine the task, triggering context, and target audience (Auftrag, Anlass, and Adressat), and Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau propose that scholarship on industrial film should examine the “three Rs” of “record (institutional memory), rhetoric (governance), and rationalization (optimizing process).”3 While the titles analyzed below are still fiction films, they are grounded in a specific landscape or industrial site and have a primary goal of saying something about that site to an audience. Elsaesser describes a similar project about Rotterdam in which “the point is not to unearth forgotten ‘auteurs’ of the art of cinema, but to make the city the central reference point, indeed the veritable ‘auteur’ of a body of work.”4 These comments suggest that film’s role as an ecological archive applies to cities and industrial landscapes no less than to the rural scenes and multiple species discussed in chapter 1. In the films discussed below, the rapidly industrializing rural areas of 1920s Germany, rather than the single metropolis of Rotterdam, form the core around which my analysis revolves. The following films blend the patterns of Heimat film and industrial film; as such, a mode of analysis fully born of the Industriefilm paradigm would be inappropriate. While the city or industrial site shown on film is certainly a key element of the filmmaking process, and while the task and audience are important considerations, the creation of a fiction film or feature-length documentary also requires significant creative input from a filmmaker, if not an all-powerful auteur. This book as a whole argues that the ecological archive of film is situated at the confluence of human and material agencies; the resulting curation of the material world can catalyze new environmental changes. In the films discussed in other chapters, these processes are more subtle, but the films discussed below—sitting at the border between popular fiction film and commissioned industrial film—are born directly and explicitly out of the interplay between creative curation and material reality.

Hunger in Waldenburg Phil Jutzi’s Ums tägliche Brot: Hunger in Waldenburg (For Daily Bread: Hunger in Waldenburg, 1929)5 portrays a rural landscape that is in the 3 Hediger and Vonderau, “Introduction,” 11. Cf. Elsaesser, “Archives and Archaeologies,” 23 and Hediger and Vonderau, “Record, Rhetoric, Rationalization,” 35–50. 4 Elsaesser, “Archives and Archaeologies,” 20. 5 The film’s English title is listed on https://www.imdb.com/ as The Shadow of a Mine. In this analysis, however, all translations, including the title, are taken from the subtitles of the Filmmuseum Potsdam’s 2018 DVD release of the film, which is based on a reconstruction completed at the Bundesarchiv-­Filmarchiv in 1997.

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process of being industrialized. The film was made as a semi-documentary using local residents who essentially portray themselves on screen.6 It has been described as an example of the development of German documentary filmmaking “between fiction and fact, between Russian influence and German adaptability.”7 The film was produced by the socialist production company Volksfilmverband and distributed by Verleih Filmkartell Weltfilm GmbH, a distribution firm created from a network of prior film companies that were promoting international workers’ solidarity and agitating for socialist reform. As such, the film arose from a network of film companies created in deliberate opposition to the escapist and conformist fare of the mainstream cinema, most clearly embodied in the films of UFA.8 Recalling that industrial films can be defined as “films made by and for the purposes of industrial and social organizations,”9 we can categorize Hunger in Waldenburg as an industrial film, but with goals that sharply contrast with what might be promoted in a film created by a corporation in order to curate its public image or educate its workers. For this film, the intent and contexts are centered around a socialist organization trying to raise awareness and fight against the miserable plight of workers as a result of rapid industrialization. The film consists of two parts that convey the same content, first through documentary style and then through a fictional plot. In the first part, a montage of documentary and staged footage is shown, interspersed with subtitles that share statistics about the poverty of the Silesian miners and weavers. It begins by showing images of the squalid living conditions and statistics regarding the poverty and poor health of workers in the mining town. One intertitle displays a quotation from a local health official declaring that 90% of the population is malnourished, but that this statistic is not sufficient to understand the situation because “going hungry has become such an art in this population for centuries that other measurements are to be applied.” Other intertitles try to provide examples of these different measures: for example, 3.2% of all schoolchildren lack shoes, 21.4% lack jackets; of 350 schoolgirls, 33 have tuberculosis. After these images and statistics, a brief sequence provides contrast by showing the extreme wealth consolidated in the nearby palace of Fürstenstein. Extreme long shots show the palace nestled in a wintery forested landscape, then a series of shots alternate between the lavish palace, idyllic woodlands, and brief shots of the massive mining machines as well as the weaving looms that dominate the lives of the impoverished masses. A final

6 7 8 9

See Murray, Film and the German Left, 225–28. Grisko, “Hunger in der Morgenröte,” 25. Grisko, “Hunger in der Morgenröte,” 26. Hediger and Vonderau, “Introduction,” 10.



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intertitle declares: “In the realm of coal, in the realm of the loom, the same poverty.” In the second part, beginning about fourteen minutes into the film, the same information is conveyed through a melodramatic fictional story, but in reverse order: the story begins in the house of impoverished weavers and ends in the miners’ slums. The protagonist is the son of a weaver in the rural town of Waldenburg, in the province of Silesia.10 Fed up with chronic hunger at home, he leaves his village to seek work at a nearby factory. Upon arriving at the factory, the young man struggles to find housing. Another worker comes to his aid and convinces a woman with a child to make space for the newcomer in her already overcrowded apartment. The young man fails to find work and is unable to pay rent. Oppressed by the grim environment of the Mietskasernen (workers’ slums), he gets into a fight with the abusive landlord and dies when the landlord pushes him down the stairs of his apartment complex. As he is dying, a montage of earlier scenes and landscapes offers a recap of his short, unhappy life amid the poverty of the Silesian weavers and miners. The film proclaims its authenticity in an opening intertitle.11 At the end of the opening credits, a scrolling text asserts: “This film shows people and their lot from the Waldenburg coal mining area. It shows nothing other than the reality. It hides nothing and adds nothing. No actors were involved. All the footage, without exception, was filmed in situ. The report shows conditions from January 1929.” To prove the film’s authenticity, this quotation mentions not only that it employs local residents, but also that it features Verhältnisse—relationships or conditions, as revealed in the numerous statistics as well as in the filmic editing that brings various pieces together—and displays real places. While the people and conditions are shown through the plot and statistics, the focus on the environment arises through more innovative visual techniques. Indeed, the landscape and industrial shots that contrast the palace with the mining machines have been described as one of the few visually innovative aspects of the film.12 In the sequence described above that juxtaposes contrasting landscapes, a series of dissolves guides the viewer from the mining slums to the rural palace via a series of tilting shots that scan up vertical structures: first the church towers in the impoverished village, then a factory smokestack, a snow-covered evergreen, and finally the ornate façade 10 The area is in present-day Poland; the town is known as Wałbrzych in Polish and Valbrich in English. 11 Various other contemporary semi-documentary films similarly use an opening intertitle to assert the film’s reality content; examples discussed in this study include the 1926 mountain film Der heilige Berg (see chapter 4), and the 1930 Berlin film Menschen am Sonntag (discussed in chapter 5). 12 Murray, Film and the German Left, 227.

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of the palace. The contrast between industry and rural idyll suggests the familiar country-versus-city opposition of Heimat literature, but the film uses this contrast to criticize unequal distribution of wealth rather than to celebrate the countryside as an escape from the city. As the worker walks from his hometown to the industrial site, he traverses a wintery landscape of evergreens and meadows blanketed in a thick coat of snow. At one point, skiers are shown descending the forested slopes. The juxtaposition of these two types of travel emphasizes two very different ways of interacting—both physically and filmically—with the rural landscape. The skiers, presumably tourists, frolic in the outdoor setting; these images are intercut with slowly panning nature shots. While the skiers glide smoothly across the snow, the worker is hurried and jerky in his brisk walk; his trip is marked by discomfort, not recreation, and the setting functions as a corridor between places of poverty rather than a site of leisure. The film thus highlights the struggles of rural life that are absent from idyllic Heimatfilm imagery. The contrast between Heimat and industry becomes more explicit just before the events that lead to the film’s tragic conclusion. In a medium shot, the camera shows a simple tapestry hanging on the wall behind one of the children of the woman with whom the weaver is lodging. Into the fabric are woven the words: “Trautes Heim mit seinem Frieden / Ist ein Stück vom Paradies” (Sweet home with its peace / is a little bit of paradise). An image stitched into the fabric between the two lines of text shows a house or structure with three trees of different sizes growing to the left, and three similarly sized trees in the background to the right (fig. 2.1). The schematic image of a simple structure embedded into a sylvan background suggests a balance of natural and cultural elements. In a jarring cut, this understated Heimat imagery is suddenly replaced by an image of three massive smokestacks (fig. 2.2). The stacks and their rising columns of steam occupy three quarters of the frame, while a leafless tree appears as a mere skeleton in the upper left corner of the image. The angled edge of a roof occupies the extreme bottom right corner of the frame. The trees and simple architectural structures from the needlepoint stitching are still present but are pushed to the margins, replaced by the immense industrial bodies in the center. The simple structure suggested to be the Heim in the needlepoint image stands in direct opposition to the actual human residences shown in the film. In the documentary sequences of the first part, one statistic declares that 48% of apartments consist of a single room. In the second half, when the young woman is first asked to take in the weaver in her apartment, at the request of another worker who does not have any space in his own residence, she replies: “Ich in meinem Stall?” (me in

Figure 2.1.  Clichéd elements of Heimat imagery . . .

Figure 2.2.   . . . reconfigured as a harsh industrial landscape. Hunger in Waldenburg (1929).

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my stall).13 This dialogue sets humans on a level with nonhuman animals through the description of an apartment as a stall. Shortly afterward, when the weaver has moved in and is staring out the window at the joyless courtyard and an exterior wall on the opposite side, the woman fills in details regarding the desolation he sees: “three hundred families in this one tenement . . . seven people in one room . . . and those who can’t pay their rent are forced into the street.”14 Like farm animals kept in a stall— a dwelling designed not to give joy or satisfaction but only to meet the bodily needs for food and shelter so that the animals can continue to provide value for humans—the residents are packed into miserable workers’ tenements with maximum density. Immediately after this exchange, she tells the lodger that she would have killed herself long ago if not for the children, foreshadowing the film’s conclusion, in which the miner’s death seems to be caused by the miserable living conditions. In the final scenes of the film, the landlord and his daughter take on the roles of antagonists; they become the human face of the apartment building. In the climax, the young weaver attempts to resist the landlord’s abusive behavior during rent collection, resulting in the young man’s fatal fall down the stairs. These events suggest an equivalence between the psychological and physical oppression enacted by both the nonhuman building and its human managers. The combination of human and environmental violence reiterates in narrative form the statistics from the beginning of the film; it also literalizes Heinrich Zille’s statement, featured prominently in another 1929 film directed by Jutzi, that “you can kill a person with an apartment just like with an axe.”15 Responses to the film remind us that the poverty of the Silesian weavers was already well known by 1929. Gerhard Hauptmann’s play Die Weber (The Weavers, 1892) had famously depicted the weavers’ struggles culminating in their 1844 uprising (Weberaufstand); Hauptmann’s play was made into a film of the same title in 1927. Because the history of the issue in Silesia was well known, the focus on workers’ travails in Hunger in Waldenburg was simply accepted as a given. In the LichtBildBühne (Motion Picture Stage) review, a brief comment describes the photography as being unremarkable (in contrast to reviews of Sprengbagger 1010, discussed below), but the critic’s greatest complaint is that the film adds nothing new to viewers’ knowledge of the struggles in Waldenburg: 13 The subtitles translate Stall as “shed”; I prefer to keep “stall” in English because the implication of a shelter for farm animals, which applies in both German and English, is relevant for the analysis. 14 These intertitles are in English on the DVD, since portions of the reconstructed copy were made from a print created by the director for the English market. 15 Zille’s quotation occupies an important position in Jutzi’s 1929 film Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness).



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The horrible conditions in Waldenburg are familiar. The documentary (Filmreportage) could therefore have counted on receiving strong interest. If we determine that the film disappoints . . . then we are not suggesting that the problems are not so bad. But we do want to say that the surplus of misery in Waldenburg (at least, for example, in comparison to the Berlin proletariat) can hardly be captured on film in a way that makes us feel this excess of misery. Unfortunately, the film thus loses its effect as an accusatory document. What we already knew about Waldenburg—from words and reports—stirred us decidedly more deeply.16

The reviewer expects the film to provide new information and complains that it does not succeed in portraying the extreme misery and hardship in Waldenburg. While the film may not have provided new information, its visual juxtaposition of rural scenes with industrial sites—and especially its inclusion of labor issues within this constellation—offers a productive comparison to Sprengbagger 1010, a film centered on similar issues that was released the same year. In both films, the juxtapositions and environmental transformations on screen simultaneously draw power from their prefilmic materiality and their filmic curation, and then they take on another level of environmental impact through discourse that arises in relation to the film.

Sprengbagger 1010 Sprengbagger 1010, a 1929 film directed by Carl Ludwig Achaz-Duisberg, portrays an idyllic landscape that is converted to an industrial wasteland in order to access the deposits of coal beneath the surface. After the film was initially released, it faded from view in discussions of German film history until 2011. The film emerged from obscurity after music history scholar Jens-Uwe Völmecke discovered a complete copy of the score among the papers in the estate of composer Walter Gronostay. Spurred by the rarity of a complete original score for a silent film, combined with the complexity of the music and the intriguing thematic and aesthetic contents of the film, the German TV channel ARTE collaborated with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra to rerelease the film with a new recording of the score in 2011.17 A short article in Film-Dienst (Film Service), printed as a preview before the restored film was aired on German television, gives an apt overview of the film in its pithy title “Die Heimatmaschine” (The Heimat Machine). This early text in the film’s second life also points toward some 16 “Hunger in Waldenburg,” LichtBildBühne, March 16, 1929. 17 Kothenschulte, “Heimatmaschine,” 15.

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of the film’s open questions and core contradictions. It describes the film as a forgotten masterpiece that had no strong supporters (“keine starke Lobby”) at the time of its creation and therefore garnered little attention from the film world. It then describes the film as an “independent production—Duisberg had produced the film himself.”18 But how did a part-time actor and first-time film director come by the funds to produce his own film? The clear answer is acknowledged in the article’s description of the film as the “only directorial work of the film-enthusiast son of a businessman, Carl Ludwig Achaz-Duisberg.”19 When not only AchazDuisberg but also the industrial empire led by his father is considered, it becomes clear that the film in fact had a quite formidable lobby, and was not entirely independent. The director was the son of the industrialist Carl Duisberg, who had risen to prominence as a researcher at Bayer, then planned Bayer’s huge and innovative factory at Leverkusen, and finally pushed for consolidation of major German chemical companies in a structure inspired by the “trusts” in the US steel and gunpowder industries, which he encountered during a visit to America in 1903.20 These consolidation efforts eventually led to the creation of IG Farben (short for Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie), a conglomerate of German chemical dye companies that later became notorious for its role in the atrocities of the Nazi era.21 Sprengbagger 1010 emerged before the darkest chapter in IG Farben’s corporate history, and it is difficult to trace the exact lines of influence between Duisberg, as a representative of major industry, and AchazDuisberg, as the director of the film. An initial glance at the industrialist’s biography reveals that he opposed his son’s attempt to begin a career in acting and took issue with what he saw as the moral degeneracy of modern theater in Germany.22 Perhaps, then, this film focusing on core conflicts of industrial development and landscape change, featuring a romantic subplot (with minimal sexually suggestive content) carried out between an engineer and a traditional baroness, might be seen as an attempt to create a film with some modern elements that nonetheless thoroughly avoids sexual or moral topics that Duisberg deemed worthy of censorship. But focusing on Duisberg’s discomfort with modernist theater would suggest only a very indirect line of influence to Achaz-Duisberg’s 18 Kothenschulte, “Heimatmaschine,” 15. 19 Kothenschulte, “Heimatmaschine,” 15. 20 Morris, The Matter Factory, 248. 21 An overview of Carl Duisberg’s role in the creation of IG Farben can be found in Abelshauser et al., BASF, 217. For discussion of IG Farben’s involvement in the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, see Hayes, Industry and Ideology; on Duisberg’s somewhat ambivalent role in this process, see Hayes, “Duisberg, Carl,” n.p. 22 Plumpe, Carl Duisberg, 423.



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romantic modernist film. The basic facts of the film’s production indicate that this influence was much more direct. Sprengbagger 1010 was produced by Terra Film, a company that produced an unremarkable lineup of comedies, dramas, and crime thrillers in the years around 1929. What the list of titles might hide is the ownership of the company. Through 1928, Terra’s two primary owners were Ullstein Verlag, a publishing firm, and IG Farben. In 1928, IG Farben purchased Ullstein’s portion of the production company.23 A report in the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung (Berlin Financial Newspaper) from February 1929 describes the replacement of Terra Film’s board members who had represented Ullstein with new members who represented IG Farben. At this point, Terra was effectively the film branch of the chemical-producing giant. Moreover, in the brief news article describing the takeover, a representative of IG Farben describes plans to improve the struggling company’s fortunes by means of a number of “Qualitätsfilme” (quality films) with titles like Revolutionshochzeit (Revolutionary Wedding), Eine Nacht in London (A Night in London), and Der Kampf der Tertia (Fight of the Tertia), as well as a “Großfilm” (major film) called Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt (The Woman One Longs For), whose cast would feature stars including Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Kortner, and Frida Richard.24 In other words, in their public statements, representatives of IG Farben emphasized the company’s output of entertainment films. But already, the company was in the process of creating Sprengbagger 1010, an industrial film that dramatizes, and to some extent glorifies, the transformation of the land through the rise of industry. Moreover, the industrial shots in the film were created on location at the Leunawerke, IG Farben’s largest industrial site, a massive factory in the town of Leuna in western Saxony. The fact that the factory still belonged to the firm was largely due to Carl Duisberg’s vehement objection when a proposal was made for the German government to purchase the Leuna factory in the midst of the uncertain economic situation after World War I,25 and now in 1929, Duisberg was the second most powerful person (behind Carl Bosch) within the massive corporate structure of IG Farben and was chair of the organization’s Central Committee (Zentralausschuss).26 These background facts make a strong case for considering Sprengbagger 1010 through the interpretive framework of industrial film. Hediger and Vonderau argue that the industrial film “is a strategically weak and parasitic form in the sense that it can assume the appearance of 23 See Hake, German National Cinema, 33, and Murray, Film and the German Left, 61. 24 “Terra Film A.G. in Berlin,” 6. 25 Abelshauser et al., BASF, 185. 26 Abelshauser et al., BASF, 217.

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other, more stable genres and formats and pass as a scientific film, an educational film, or a documentary”—or in this case, a feature-length romantic drama—“for strategic reasons.”27 The target audience for Sprengbagger is the broad cinemagoing population, not the narrower group of workers or industry insiders who are often targeted by industrial films. This background provides helpful context for the roles the film came to play in Weimar-era environmental discourse. The film originated from a massive industrial corporation and proffered a particular view of industry that mixes romantic nostalgia with the technological fascination of New Objectivity, but once it entered public discourse, it became a gathering point for a broad array of perspectives on environmental change. Critics described Sprengbagger 1010 as portraying the “conflict between the all-consuming machine and the primal power of nature.”28 In Achaz-Duisberg’s film, engineer Karl Hartmann has just completed the design for an ingenious new machine that can perform controlled detonations to gain access to underground coal deposits, dig up the coal, and collect it, all within a single process.29 Hartmann is portrayed as a hesitant genius. He has stayed up all night to complete the designs for his machine, but rather than making him eager to implement the plan, the work has only left him with a desire to get back to his rural homeland, away from the industrial wasteland in which he works.30 Early in the film, he is shown wandering through the factory landscape as if on a hike through mountain scenery, and when he arrives at a particularly Alpinelooking pile of coal, the image dissolves into a brief shot of skiers gliding down a mountain slope (fig. 2.3). The overt function of this sequence is to show that the protagonist longs for natural landscapes, but its generic impact is more mixed: while it anticipates later Heimatfilme in portraying Alpine landscapes as an antidote to the ills of modern technology, it also creates a visual equivalency between the mountain sublime and the overpowering industrial environments of the factory. This tension remains unresolved throughout the film. Hartmann does in fact escape from the factory and return to his native soil, where his mother operates a mill that has been in the family for centuries. While home, he falls in love with a landowning aristocrat, Camilla von Einerm; their courtship is played out in rural scenes of 27 Hediger and Vonderau, “Record, Rhetoric, Rationalization,” 46. 28 Jacobi, “Sprengbagger 1010.” 29 The film’s title is the name of this machine: “sprengen” means to detonate, and a “Bagger” is an excavator or backhoe. For lack of an adequate translation in English, I leave the title in its German original throughout this chapter. 30 Ofer Ashkenazi writes that the plot initially seems to display “the homecoming of a prodigal son,” a familiar trope of Heimatfilm narratives. Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema, 86.



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Figure 2.3.  Mountains of coal in Sprengbagger 1010.

bathing in idyllic ponds and riding horses through the green landscape. The ambivalence regarding where he belongs is thus replicated in the romantic tensions of a love triangle: Hartmann leaves his doting female colleague Olga Lossen, a character marked by the short hair and seductive sophistication of the Weimar Republic’s “New Woman,” and returns to a seemingly more wholesome feminine force in his pastoral homeland. Whereas Hartmann had wandered the industrial landscape in solitary isolation, upon his return home he is surrounded by family, friends, neighbors, and workers engaged in physical labor in the fields. He even reconnects with nonhuman animals from horses and livestock to wild deer in the forest. Then, on one of his outings with Camilla, he discovers lignite while helping a group of children to dig a hole for a pet that has died, and he cannot resist his engineer’s urge to put the resource to use. The contrast between his sympathetic urge to help the mourning children and his irresistible need to exploit the newly discovered natural resource accentuates the conflict between Heimat and industry. In the final section of the film, Hartmann’s new machine transforms the Heimat into a smokestack-ridden scene of industrial progress. In the process, the characters who represent Heimat are sacrificed: Hartmann’s mother burns down the family mill (with herself inside) rather than accept the forced sale to industrial developers, and the young Camilla

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von Einerm wanders into the fenced-off fields while the detonations are underway.31 With the fate of these two characters, the film strikes a tragic note, yet the final intertitles contradict the tragic impact by celebrating the factory for providing work and bread for hundreds of thousands of people, even as images of flaming industrial smokestacks seem to undermine and condemn such an upbeat conclusion. At the level of images, the loss of the verdant Heimat seems to be mourned, yet the verbal justification sustains the tension between the forces of rationalized industrial progress and nostalgic aesthetic landscape traditions. The ambiguities within the film are echoed in reviews of the day. Critic Lucy von Jacobi writes: “This is a film of 1930. A problem of 1930. The conflict between the all-consuming machine and the primal power of nature (Urgewalt der Natur), which is being fought with brutality and cunning, has escalated to the point that it is an obvious task to take up this problem and give it cinematic form.”32 Jacobi praises the film’s portrayal of industrial landscapes and asserts that the film deals with an absolutely crucial and timely theme. But she strongly objects to its conclusion: “Hesitating in the face of ironclad necessity is a useless and dangerous waste of energy. We must affirm the world of the machines.”33 In Jacobi’s assessment, the new must inevitably triumph. And she writes that, at least according to the printed program at the film’s premiere, it does. Camilla von Einerm “gets disoriented and wanders into the detonation area; according to the program booklet, she is saved and ‘strides at the side of her beloved toward a new future.’ But the film that we saw could not make up its mind. We saw her helpless in the turmoil of the raging masses of earth—then the curtain sank, undecided.”34 Jacobi endorses modernization and objects to a plot that refuses to follow what she sees as a necessary course. It is of interest here that neither the film itself nor Jacobi’s objection calls for the fusion of tradition and modernity that Jeffrey Herf speaks of as “reactionary modernism.”35 The clash between tradition and industrial progress remains intact; the film simply leaves the outcome of 31 This ending is seen in the 2011 rerelease. As stated in an opening text screen, this version is missing forty-five minutes that were only seen at the film’s initial release and were soon cut for a shortened version. The full-length version is considered lost; a copy of the shortened film is housed at the federal film archive in Berlin. I have opted to describe this shortened plot, since it aligns with the description of the film in the review by Lucy von Jacobi, discussed below. Ashkenazi’s analysis of the film draws on written material surrounding the film’s release in order to attempt an analysis based on the original plot. See Ashkenazi, AntiHeimat Cinema, 87. 32 Jacobi, “Sprengbagger 1010,” 181. 33 Jacobi, “Sprengbagger 1010,” 181. 34 Jacobi, “Sprengbagger 1010,” 181. 35 Herf, Reactionary Modernism.



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the conflict unresolved, whereas Jacobi demands that it be decided in favor of industry. The Film-Kurier reviewer Ernst Jäger also lauds the film’s images, although his notice specifically praises the film’s nature shots more than the factory images. In praising occasional industrial segments, his response is remarkable for its similarity to contemporary descriptions of the mountain film: “in several moments the machine has a countenance (Antlitz)”—precisely the term Béla Balázs uses to describe Arnold Fanck’s portrayal of mountain scenery, as will be discussed in chapter 4.36 In the iconography and in the discourse about it, the industrial sublime merges with the mountain sublime. The primary focus of the Film-Kurier review, however, like that of Jacobi’s commentary, lies not in the visual impact of the film but in its thematic content. The review claims that the film shows empty landscapes without social contexts or connections, resulting in “an empty play of motifs” that creates a work of “propaganda for the new German industrialists.” The reason: “on the opposite side from the pioneers of industry—stand no workers. Typical: an engineer wanders through the gigantic nitrogen compound of the Leunawerke, he sees fairy tale landscapes, no workshops, no workers.” This, the review states, is the dream of how industrialists would resolve labor conflicts: “the factory without workers.”37 The omission of workers (and labor conflicts) is particularly noteworthy because the film was shot at the Leunawerke factory, which had played a major role in labor conflicts and the growth of the workers’ movement in the 1920s.38 Instead of pitting industrialists against organized labor, the reviewer laments that the film focuses on an obsolete conflict: “The go-getter spirit of the knights of industry must find an opponent—the authors therefore set forth people who live from the soil, rooted to the earth, loyal to tradition, as the opposing force. Conflicts, therefore, that moved Romantic landscape lovers (Landschaftsromantiker) a half century ago. Today without relevance.”39 Attentive readers of FilmKurier would not have been surprised by the fact that the film ignores labor and focuses on the landscape. An article from several months earlier describes the film’s production and quotes director Achaz-Duisberg regarding precisely this point: The political question, the dispute between capital and labor, is only one side of the issue. We are taking up the other side. That is the fact of the flattening of the earth through technology. Industrialization 36 Jäger, “Sprengbagger 1010”; Balázs, “Der Fall Dr. Fanck,” 288. 37 Jäger, “Sprengbagger 1010.” 38 See, for example, Abelshauser et al., BASF, 171, 176–77, 194–95; Frank, “Nachwort,” 127. 39 Jäger, “Sprengbagger 1010.”

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continues incessantly. Villages are being moved fourteen kilometers, mountains 150 meters high simply shot down. And all to serve purely technical goals. In all of this, in spite of all objectivity, the machine is nothing less than unromantic. You see, I want to show this rhythm of the machine. And, furthermore, the clash that arises from the ongoing industrial expansion at the moment when two worlds collide: that of the machines, against that of people who have grown up from the earth (Erdgewachsenen).40

The director views the transformation of rural landscapes into industrial sites as a pressing topic, in stark distinction to Ernst Jäger’s Film-Kurier review. Further, the director’s assertion that “industrialization continues incessantly” emphasizes the inevitability of industrialization that Jacobi also proclaims. The development continues simply to serve “technical goals”—as if agency is given to the machines themselves rather than the people who create and control them. It is understandable why Jäger complains that the human conflict at the core of industrialism is absent. More remarkable is Jacobi’s reaction: she endorses the transformation of the German landscape and takes issue with the negative presentation of this transformation, seen both in the film’s images and (to a somewhat lesser extent) in Achaz-Duisberg’s words. What Jacobi describes in a forward-looking gesture as “a problem of 1930,” Jäger’s review dismisses as not current or relevant, but fifty years out of date. The film serves as a flash point not only for discussions of questions surrounding industrialization but also for describing which questions are even worth addressing. Through this debate among critics, the film inserts itself into broader discourses that were taking place in the precise location where the film was shot. The Leunawerke, the huge factory mentioned in both reviews, was built in 1916 in the town of Leuna. Volker Frank’s account of the history of the Leunawerke emphasizes the destroyed environments: fields of grain, beets, and potatoes disappeared; the landscape of the Saale river changed dramatically; exhaust from the chimneys polluted the area. At the same time, progressive workers made the factory a crucial early site of the German workers’ movement.41 Frank’s account, surely in part because of its publication site and date within the German Democratic Republic, emphasizes the importance of 40 Feld, “Ein deutscher Industriefilm wird gedreht.” 41 Frank, “Nachwort,” 127. A recent historical study shows that class conflict and political tensions were also relevant to the initial construction of the factory: “unhappy farmers” were forced to sell their property at “confiscatory prices” as creation of the factory was forced upon the local population, in large part due to pressures to shift production to a more secure location away from Germany’s borders in the midst of World War I. Abelshauser et al., BASF, 170.



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the Leunawerke as a site of the workers’ movement, yet it ascribes equal significance to the destruction of agricultural landscapes and the pollution from industrial smokestacks. This dual emphasis is also found in Heimat journals of the era. In keeping with the destruction of rural landscapes to create the Leunawerke and the images at the end of Sprengbagger 1010, a 1930 article from the newsletter of the Saxony Heimat Protection Club describes an idyllic landscape of ponds and sand dunes that is soon to be destroyed, “a victim of the Werminghoff mine, since exploitable brown coal (Braunkohle) deposits have been found under it.” In the report from the Heimat journal, just as in the film, an idyllic landscape falls victim to lignite extraction. The article, wasting no ink on lamenting and protesting the impending loss of the landscape, briefly describes the location and the expected mining operation. It then recounts at length a local myth regarding the formation of the pond in which a magician creates workers out of grain seeds. In a scene reminiscent of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the magician’s servant steals the magic book and attempts the trick but is unable to transform the workers back into seeds. To keep the servants busy, he has them make piles of sand, resulting in the area’s huge sand dunes.42 The tone of this short piece does not indulge in nostalgia; rather, it simply tells a story, so that the story might be known after the land is transformed. This Heimat journal strikes a balance between acknowledging that industrial development will not be stopped, while still seeking to preserve local folklore connected to landscapes that will soon be transformed. In its emphasis on maintaining the cultural elements of the landscape even as its physical face is lost, the article aims for a middle ground between rural idyll and industrial wasteland. In Sprengbagger 1010, released the same year and filmed 180 kilometers west of the landscape described in the article, the film’s final intertitles display none of the Heimat journal’s conciliatory tone. In the closing sequence of the film, we read: “Where once a small number of people idyllically dreamed their lives away . . .” Cut to images of the now-demolished pastoral landscape: a shot of the manor house seen through the garden; a slightly high angle shot looking down and across a grain field with a worker mowing; a slow pan across a landscape of mixed fields, trees, and forested hills. Cut to a new title frame: “. . . a vast machine world of strange beauty arises, providing bread and work for thousands!” Finally, cut to images of the Leunawerke: a low angle tracking shot moves toward and looks up at towering concrete storage containers. A slow panning shot across a landscape of chimneys and steel frame structures follows, then a superimposition showing giant steam-shovel jaws, flame-spewing smokestacks and towering steel building frames (figs. 2.4–2.7). The intertitles suggest optimism regarding the 42 Nagel, “Der Groß-Särchener Großteich,” 204–6.

Figure 2.4.  The rural landscape sacrificed to industry in Sprengbagger 1010.

Figure 2.5.  From Sprengbagger 1010.

Figure 2.6.  The harsh final images of industry in Sprengbagger 1010.

Figure 2.7.  From Sprengbagger 1010.

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impact of technology and industrial development. But these desolate final shots collide with the intertitles and give rise to an unresolved tension. The frame-filling maw of the steam shovel, which could be said to represent the Bagger of the film’s title and which in this image seems to breathe fire like a dragon, offers a grim replacement for the solitary worker in the fields just a few shots before. Similarly, the smooth contours of a verdant landscape give way to a straight line of smokestacks extending into the distance, replacing natural curves with rationalized geometric order. Ofer Ashkenazi describes the portrayal of rural landscapes in the film’s final sequence as “a cinematic cliché of Heimat.”43 Indeed, these images call to mind yet another element from Heimat journals of the day: the emblem for the nationwide Deutscher Bund Heimatschutz (German Heimat Protection League), established two decades earlier, is a pastoral panorama resembling the one that disappears at the end of AchazDuisberg’s film. Historian William Rollins points out, in his extended discussion of images promoted by Heimatschutz activists, that gently curving waterways and “houses and towns [that] blend into their surroundings” are a core feature of Heimat imagery, in contrast to the straight lines of modernized landscapes.44 Leaning into these contrasts, the final intertitles in Sprengbagger 1010 appear honest in extolling the benefits of industry, yet the images impart a negative charge to this environmental transformation. According to Ashkenazi, “the film’s ending suggests that the destruction of the idyllic landscape is a tragic but necessary development toward progress.”45 While progress gets the final word, the process is still portrayed as a tragedy; the film’s conclusion neither longs for a return to a pre-modern way of life nor endorses Lucy von Jacobi’s paean for technological progress. The film stands deliberately between these competing discourses and visions for the landscape. This ambivalence is precisely what makes the film a useful example of Weimarera Heimat discourse. Already within the film itself, a variety of viewpoints are portrayed, and this plurality of positions continues into the commentaries that respond to the film. Whereas West German Heimat films of the 1950s have been described as representing a “flight from reality,”46

43 Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema, 89. Ashkenazi focuses in particular on Helmar Lerski, director of photography for Sprengbagger 1010, and situates the film within a broader discussion of works by Jewish filmmakers who “appropriated familiar motifs of modern German Heimat culture to undermine the sentiments, memories, and exclusionary identities associated with them.” Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema, 8. 44 Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home, 175–85. 45 Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema, 88. 46 Höfig, Der deutsche Heimatfilm, 1.



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Figure 2.8.  Logo of the Deutscher Bund Heimatschutz (Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home, 182).

Sprengbagger 1010 functions as a node within a real-world debate about environmental transformations. Of course, not all voices in this real-world debate had equal volume. As the unnamed provider of both funding and on-site locations for the film, IG Farben’s influence looms large but remains largely hidden. As a result, critics complaining that the film shows no workers seem to be arguing against a poor aesthetic decision by the director rather than a work of anti-labor propaganda. When this criticism is considered more closely, it becomes clear that workers are not absent from the film: they are only missing from the eerily empty opening scenes as Hartmann wanders through the industrial landscape. When he leaves the factory for his pastoral home, work is seen in various forms. At first, the work shown aligns with nostalgic visions of Heimat as a premodern pastoral landscape: peasants are seen gathering hay and guiding teams of horses through the fields. Later, when the company has purchased the lands, excavations have begun, and the detonations are about to take place, numerous workers are seen taking part in the process. They are spread out along the train tracks and platforms of the factory, working on giant machine structures, or preparing for detonations in the open-pit mine. But holding with Jäger’s critique, the workers do not stand opposite the managers. Instead, they are clearly all on the same team: managers, laborers, and even the displaced townspeople all gather to support the construction of the new industrial site. This portrayal suggests a massive choreography of bodies, machines, and materials that subtly supports the view of industrial giant as savior for the region. The impact of this subtle, and largely visual, filmic messaging, which aligns with what Jacques Ellul describes as sociological propaganda,47 seems likely to drown out any critics’ individual voices of dissent. 47 Ellul, Propaganda, 63–70.

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And yet, once again, the filmmakers do not have full control over the storytelling power of the materials and bodies shown on screen. A series of explosions just before the conclusion hints that the story might end in tragedy, and as the various accounts of the film’s initial release demonstrate, viewers in fact did encounter mixed messages regarding whether the film boldly embraced the future or lamented the loss of Heimat. But an unintended aspect of the film’s storytelling, arising from the concluding explosions together with the viewers’ likely background knowledge about the company behind the film, points toward an altogether different tension. In 1921, the massive explosion of a fertilizer silo in BASF’s Oppau factory killed more than 550 people. The factories at Leuna and Oppau were linked by a shared history, in that both were owned by BASF prior to the 1925 merger with other chemical firms under the umbrella of IG Farben, and the Leuna works were built specifically because production from the Oppau factory was deemed insufficient and vulnerable to French bombing during World War I.48 At a memorial service for the workers from the Oppau factory who had been killed in the explosion, Carl Bosch, chairman of the board of directors at BASF, somberly declared: “The very material that was destined to create nourishment and bring life to millions in our country . . . has suddenly proven to be a savage foe, for reasons we do not yet know.”49 The quotation bears unsettling parallels to the concluding intertitles in Sprengbagger 1010, which declare that the idyllic landscapes that had provided recreation for a few idle dreamers now provide “bread and work for thousands.” The film’s text echoes Bosch’s eulogy, both in the celebration of the factory’s scale of production and ability to provide vital sustenance for human life, and in the syntactical structure that uses an unwanted alternative (whether an unproductive Heimat landscape or a deadly accident) to highlight the desirable but formidable power of the factory. By combining a closing text that echoes Bosch’s speech after the Oppau disaster with images of massive industrial structures and exploding expanses of earth, the film gains resonance through what Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann call “storied matter,” in that it participates in a “material ‘mesh’ of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces.”50 The stories that result are certainly linked to and heavily influenced by the goals of IG Farben, but they extend beyond the desired outcomes that the industrial giant might have had in mind for a feature-length industrial film. In the film’s portrayal

48 Abelshauser et al., BASF, 167–68. 49 Abelshauser et al., BASF, 196. 50 Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction,” 1–2.



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of workers as spectator-fans for a new industrial project, Sprengbagger 1010 suggests that the viewers also take the position of passive spectators applauding the industrial transformation of the landscape. And yet, already in the immediate aftermath of the film’s release, the subsequent discourse shows that the social ecologies of film, at least in the relatively free media environment of 1929, are too complex to allow such a narrowly defined impact. Sprengbagger 1010 illustrates numerous layers of complexity in how filmic environments can be understood. The vast scale of the industrial landscape existed prior to Achaz-Duisberg’s film; the materiality of the machinery and the landscapes with which the machines are juxtaposed give the film much of its visual power. Moreover, the film’s production history suggests that it can be seen as an industrial film promoting the image and justifying the operations of IG Farben. At the same time, the film creates a melodramatic plot that seems to mourn the transformation of the environment, displays nonhuman materials that tell much less favorable stories than what the filmmakers might have intended, and gives rise to discourse from various perspectives that weigh in on the processes and power structures involved in environmental change. For all the economic power of IG Farben that lurks behind the film, once it is released it takes on a new environmental function as a node in a multivocal discourse on environmental change. In both Hunger in Waldenburg and Sprengbagger 1010, elements of the landscape perform key roles in the storytelling process. Menacing machine forms and oppressive apartment buildings take the role of key players in the plot; atmospheric elements like flames (that seem to transform a steam shovel into a dragon), snow (which simultaneously triggers thoughts of winter frolicking and miserable cold), and exploding earth (which calls to mind disasters past as well as those presently occurring in the film) push the impact further. While the films were commissioned to fulfill a specific purpose, these material-discursive elements push in multiple directions. This multiplicity of meaning arises already within the film, and from there, the picture enters into a multivocal field of environmental discourse. This last point, regarding the diverse field of discourse that develops around any given film, would soon change. Another movie that juxtaposes rural and industrial images, and that was made just five years later, demonstrates a significant shift in both the portrayal of the relationship between modern and undeveloped sites, and the ways critics responded to (or ignored) environmental and social issues.

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Heimatfilm in Nazi Germany: The Consolidation of Heimat Discourse To those familiar with German film history, it should come as no surprise that the multivocal status of Heimat discourse in relation to German film changed after 1933. With the process of Gleichschaltung (coordination) under National Socialism in spring and summer of 1933, just after the Nazi takeover of power on January 30 of that year, institutions across all aspects of life in Germany were made to align with the goals of the Nazi regime.51 As a means of mass communication that could serve purposes of both propaganda (to reeducate the population toward fascist goals) and entertainment (to divert or distract audience, soon within the context of war and military occupation), the film industry played a crucial role in this process. The change within filmic Heimat discourse can be seen in the prominent example of Luis Trenker’s 1934 film Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son), released a year after the Nazi takeover of power and one of the most celebrated films of 1934. Trenker’s film bears similarities to the industrial Heimat films discussed above, in that it emphasizes a contrast between the rural landscape of St. Laurein, the hero Tonio Feuersinger’s mountain village in the Dolomites, and the urban and industrial scenes of the film’s middle section, which is set in New York City. As in Hunger in Waldenburg and Sprengbagger 1010, the transition between these contrasting environments is emphasized both visually and narratively. However, while the two films discussed above dwell at length on the economic forces and environmental transformations that connect the rural and industrial sites shown, in Trenker’s film the connections are only aesthetic, epitomized by the famous match dissolve between a mountain in the Dolomites and a skyscraper in Manhattan. Looking back at the film as a piece of environmental and social discourse within a particular historical moment, one would expect at least a few contemporaneous critical voices to have complained about what is missing. The film’s portrayal of St. Laurein acknowledges neither the presence of unemployment nor the possibility that work in a mountain village could be unpleasant or difficult. Moreover, despite the presence of international tourists in St. Laurein, Tonio seems to move between the two sites with no lasting ties other than nostalgia and romantic desire; the film elides the impact of global economic forces on local sites. The Prodigal Son provides a useful introduction to this final section of the present chapter because it bears much in common with the filmic environments of the movies discussed above, thus highlighting the marked difference in the surrounding commentary that arose around the film. Discourse surrounding the films of 51 Regarding the process of Gleichschaltung within the German film industry, see Hake, German National Cinema, 61.



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1929 showed vibrant discussion and conflict over how to portray the Heimat, but in response to Trenker’s film from 1934, no such discussions arose. Reviewers celebrated the film for its impressive visuals and effectively structured narrative, and were particularly impressed with the powerful images of the Manhattan sequence, with its awe-inspiring first shots of the skyscrapers giving way to the focused depiction of the misery of the masses.52 They did not take issue with the film’s naïve portrayal of ruralindustrial connections, just five years after similar filmic environments had given rise to lively debate. In 1929, film had occupied one position within a multivocal, much disputed discursive field: the films themselves had offered a set of arguments and visions, and in addition, multiple critics each contributed other distinct positions to the debate. In 1934, after the coordination of the film industry under Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda, no platform remained for the voices that might take issue with the oversights of Trenker’s celebration of an idyllic Heimat. In the Weimar era, popular films that blended industrial and Heimat imagery displayed the expected status of industrial film being created for a specific purpose, whether to glorify industry or to question it by calling attention to the plight of factory workers and the unemployed. However, because these pragmatic goals are carried out through fictional narrative as well as the creative curation of images through film, they open up the possibility of contradiction and multiple interpretations; they become points of intersection for contradictory and contested discourses. Weimarera film journals reveal the role of films in catalyzing debates within a contested field of discourse. But as The Prodigal Son illustrates, in the Nazi film industry, the films themselves and the surrounding discourses speak from the same position. Of course, it would be simplistic to suggest that all films made during the Nazi era are simply “ideological containers in which the Ministry of Propaganda packaged affirmation and falsehood.”53 But while the spectrum of films may not speak with a single voice, they also do not enter into the vibrant field of contradictory views that characterized film discourse of the prior era. Through the fascist regime’s control of popular culture through Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda and through the attempt to control all fields of culture through the policy of Gleichschaltung, the multivocal conversation arising through film is flattened.

52 Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 80. 53 Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 15. Rentschler criticizes past scholars of Nazi film who had focused on explicitly political and propagandistic films; instead, Rentschler examines films from the Nazi era as products that attempt “to stylize everyday reality” and thus reveal the fantasies and illusions that were created and celebrated within the context of fascism.

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To provide a fuller sense of the shifting discourse surrounding Heimat and industrial environments from Weimar to Nazi-era film, the final pages of this chapter broaden the analysis to include textual as well as filmic sources. Focusing only on films themselves would mean limiting the analysis solely to extant works, many of which are already wellstudied and canonized. Looking at journals from the same years as the films discussed above, from the late 1920s through the changing filmic landscape during the Nazi era, reveals trends that would go unnoticed if the discussion were only to include films that have been preserved. One such trend has to do with mountain films. The mountain film genre will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 4; for now, it is sufficient to recall that it is often mentioned as a predecessor to the Heimatfilm genre, as noted in chapter 1.54 One of the most celebrated mountain films, Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (The White Hell of Pitz Palu), was co-directed by Arnold Fanck and G. W. Pabst and released in 1929, the same year as Sprengbagger 1010 and Hunger in Waldenburg. Yet mountain films are generally not discussed in relation to Heimat within film journals. Instead, they are aligned with an altogether different category of outdoor and expedition films. Numerous ads, collections of still photos, and reviews describe films about dangerous expeditions or voyages to faraway places. The appeal of these films seems to lie in their ability to offer access to exciting, unreachable spaces for viewers who, for the most part, were still not able to travel far from home due to economic crises and limited mobility during the Weimar era. Several titles from the same year, including Wenn der weiße Flieder wieder blüht (When the White Lilac Blooms Again) and Schwarzwaldmädel (Black Forest Girl), would later serve as models for numerous remakes that constituted the Heimatfilmwelle of the 1950s. But these 1929 films are not labeled as Heimatfilme; instead, perhaps the most common label is Bauern-Filme, or peasant films. At the same time, various other films include Heimat in the title, and at least one is labeled as a Heimatfilm. If Heimat films released in 1929 were not the same as peasant films, what were they? What kind of Heimat did they portray on screen? And as a counter-example to familiar rural and idyllic notions, how do these films curate the interactions between humans and their environments differently? The term Heimat appears at various points in the 1929 Film-Kurier, usually in relation to topics very different from those in 1950s Heimat films. Instead of idyllic rural scenes, they focus on everyday lives of German people in the late Weimar era, portraying workers in the cities as well as German emigrants now living abroad. One such film was planned 54 See, for example, Moltke, No Place Like Home, 44 and Höfig, Der deutsche Heimatfilm, 152.



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by pioneering mountain film director Arnold Fanck. In 1929, in addition to co-directing The White Hell of Pitz Palu, Fanck was scheduled to make another film that would take on the topic of Heimat but would occupy a site far from the mountains. The title of the film is Deine Heimat, and it is announced in a large advertisement covering a quarter of a newspaper page.55 The text of the ad reads: “In spring, Arnold Fanck will climb down from the mountains to the flatlands and work on German industry just as he has done the mountains. In 1929, he will film the greatest Heimatfilm of all time about Germany: Your Homeland (The People of Work).”56 The film’s subtitle emphasizes “people” (Volk) and “work,” two themes that are conspicuously absent from most of Fanck’s films. His mountain films usually focus on solitary individuals—not the collective Volk—and feature the sporting activities of mountaineers. They do not show work; further, the protagonists are generally doctors or academics whose elite professions would not be associated with the proletariat undertones of “The People of Work.” Perhaps most importantly, there is a self-understood use of the term Heimatfilm, suggesting that the designation already had recognition value—but with a very different meaning than it would assume during the Adenauer era. The ad states that Fanck is descending from the mountains to the flatlands in order to give the same attention to German industry that he has given to the mountains and will create “the greatest Heimatfilm of all time.” The remark sets the flatlands against the mountains and suggests that Heimat is situated in the flatlands and concerned with work and industry. Deine Heimat was advertised in the 1929 Film-Kurier as a coming attraction by renowned Bergfilm director Arnold Fanck, but the film was never made. However, a film bearing the title Teure Heimat (Dear Homeland or Beloved Homeland) was released in 1929. The synopsis explains that the feature praises traditional life, argues against emigration, and shows that life abroad is equally arduous: “Praise of Heimat. Folksy (volkstümliche) propaganda against emigration. ‘Over there, you still need to slave away.’”57 The not altogether positive review is interesting because it gives a list of sites emphasized in the film, none of which would be expected in a feature of this title. The main focus is on the “Berlin proletarian milieu,” with occasional characters from different social strata to provide variety. Further, the review describes the film’s 55 “Deine Heimat (Das Volk der Arbeit),” printed in Film-Kurier on January 8, 1929. The film was never made, but the fact that the plan was advertised so prominently makes it nonetheless noteworthy as an example of Heimat discourse. 56 “Deine Heimat.” In the German original: “Arnold Fanck steigt im Frühjahr von den Bergen in die Ebene um die deutsche Industrie ebenso zu bearbeiten, wie das Hochgebirge und dreht 1929 den größten Heimatfilm aller Zeiten über Deutschland: Deine Heimat (Das Volk der Arbeit).” 57 Herzberg, “Teure Heimat.”

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“glorification of the Berlin weekend life and the beautiful sites of the local waterways.”58 The scenes of Heimat thus take the form of workers’ lives in Berlin and their leisure activities on the weekend, both in the city and the surrounding rural landscapes. A final setting that comes into play is the Hamburg harbor. Similar to reviews of 1950s Heimatfilme, the review praises the outdoor camerawork; yet here the landscapes in focus are the urban sites of Berlin and the industrial harbor of Hamburg. Beloved Homeland depicts an urbanized and industrialized notion of home that offers a marked contrast to the idyllic notions of Heimat that would come to dominate within the realm of Heimatfilm. In the years that followed, German film journals during the Nazi era showed a gradual redefinition and narrowing of the term. An article from mid-1933 calls out to the German film industry: Make “Heimat films,” whose goal should be to convey German folk culture (deutsches, völkisches Kulturgut) to the viewer in a way that is undistorted, dignified, and emphatic and to awaken the urgently needed understanding for Germany, for German character and creativity (deutsches Wesen und Schaffen) domestically and abroad! These Heimat films should show German landscape, work, art, research, and science, and should visually and aurally record unique traits, customs, traditions, and especially dialects, folk songs, and folk dances.59

This editorial rehearses many of the tropes that became central to later Heimatfilme and that certainly do not fit the descriptions of Your Homeland or Beloved Homeland from 1929. The text offers a telling comparison to the images from Sprengbagger 1010: the emphasis on “German character and creativity,” landscape, and art all call to mind the elements represented by Hartmann’s home landscape and, especially, his mother in her traditional home attached to the mill. The items that burn with the mill, a narrative expression of the 1929 film’s embrace of a modernized Heimat, are explicitly promoted in this article from 1933. Still, the text makes it clear that when Heimat films were discussed in relation to the Heimatbewegung, specifically in regard to folk art and regional culture, they were generally documentary Kulturfilme (short educational films shown as part of a preliminary program before the main feature), rather than mainstream narrative Spielfilme. By 1936, however, the distinction was loosening: “The Heimatfilm, as I see it,” writes Kurt Skaldes, “must first of all be a narrative film. But in contrast to other [films], the filmic plot here receives unalterably firm 58 Herzberg, “Teure Heimat.” 59 Berg, “‘Heimatfilme’: Ein Vorschlag zur Beiprogrammgestaltung.”



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grounding in a very specific landscape.”60 Finally, in 1944, a commentator describes the “Bavarian Heimatfilm, which by now—it’s safe to say— has conquered the world.”61 The article celebrates films based on Heimat literature such as the writings of Ludwig Thoma. Precisely this sort of film would constitute the Heimatfilmwelle of the 1950s. Fifteen years after the flourishing diversity of viewpoints within 1929 film discourse, this article describes a specific, standardized, and internationally successful form for the Heimat genre, suggesting a triumphant version of Heimatfilm in which idyllic Bavarian countrysides have become the norm. In Weimar cinema, as demonstrated by films discussed in this chapter as well as texts discussing Heimat in Weimar-era film journals, Heimat discourses and rural visions on film configure diverse environments from various perspectives, with varying levels of environmental control exerted from multiple social and economic positions. Film thus serves as a tool of what has been described as Beheimatung, an open-ended process of creating a livable space of home.62 The Nazi film industry attempted to replace these diverse discourses with a monolithic vision of Heimat on film that would align with the fascist regime’s cultural goals, and it is these simplistic idylls that controlled the filmic visions of Heimat in the decades that followed. And yet, as the examples in the chapters so far have illustrated within the discourse of Heimat, and as the next chapters will show with regards to physical infrastructures that are tied to filmic environments, films are embedded in broader environmental processes. Diverse agencies, both human and nonhuman, contribute to the visual, aural, and narrative power of film. The environmental discourses within a film may reflect attempts at total control, as in the exceptional case of the Nazi film industry, or they may involve more open-ended networks of multispecies interaction and multi-level discourse. But regardless of what the filmmakers intend, the filmic medium cannot be fully contained: the material-discursive influences and impacts inevitably extend beyond the edge of the screen. The ecological archive of cinema, in the examples related to Heimat discussed in these first two chapters as well as in films centered on physical infrastructures that will be discussed in the chapters ahead, remains bound up in the tension between creative curation and materiality.

60 Skaldes, “Bekenntnis zum Heimatfilm.” 61 Petzet, “Im Schatten Ludwig Thomas.” 62 Binder, “Beheimatung statt Heimat.”

3: Infrastructure in the Anthropo(s)cene: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive In the beginning, there was the oil rig. Then came the asphalt streets that sprawl miles and miles through dismal wastelands, always flanked by oil rigs growing wild. Then, for beautification of the surroundings, the palm trees are brought in.1

T

focused on the status of Heimat discourse as a key locus for the ecological archive of German cinema. Heimat films and related discourse can reveal both the ways in which environments were debated, curated, and deliberately constructed on screen (for example, in the multispecies assemblages of Die Geierwally discussed in chapter 1, or the transformation from rural to industrial landscapes in industrial Heimat films discussed in chapter 2) and how the nonhuman elements of these films carry out both physical actions and signifying potential beyond what the filmmakers can control. This can be seen both in the mutual violence between humans and vultures involved in filming Die Geierwally, despite the purported peaceful interspecies relations in the film, and in the connotation of industrial disaster that Sprengbagger 1010 implies due to the major disasters connected to the companies and industrial landscapes celebrated in the film. The first chapters traced ways in which the words and images of Heimat discourses connect to physical changes in the environment in ways that are often more complex and contradictory than what the creators of the initial discourse might have intended. Now, in part two, the book’s focus shifts from the seemingly immaterial discourse of Heimat (which is, of course, connected to material change in complex ways), to the seemingly physical status of infrastructures in and around German environmental films, paying particular attention to films of the Weimar era, a focus justified by the intense expansion of

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he first chapters of this book

Lang, “Zwischen Bohrtürmen und Palmen,” 16.



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infrastructures in Germany’s cities and rural areas in the final decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. Just as environmental discourses, especially ideas of Heimat, within German films serve as both response to and instigator of physical changes in the nonfilmic world, the portrayal and creation of physical infrastructures on screen sheds new light on environmental thought and discourse. Both parts of this book explore the complex relationships between film as a creative medium and the physical changes to the nonhuman environment. The division between the two parts of the book marks a shift in emphasis between points on a spectrum rather than a transition to a completely distinct object of study: while the first part starts with questions about Heimat in order to explore the environmental implications of film as both discourse and materiality, the second part starts with a focus on physical infrastructures, and then zooms out to find how these on-screen infrastructures create an archive for broader trends in ecological thought. Before launching the first case study (an analysis of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) of this second part of the book, it is worth noting that as I first drafted these pages, tensions regarding materiality, discourse, and infrastructure were of significant interest close to my own home. The question of what entails infrastructure, and how it is best created or changed, had dominated federal politics in the United States for much of the past year. The president introduced plans for a massive infrastructure bill in 2021. In the months that followed, the process of the bill becoming a law followed an unsurprising trajectory: partisan conflicts and ensuing negotiations led to the ultimate passage of a bill that was far more modest than what had initially been proposed. But in this bill, the disagreements were not simply about bigger or smaller government, more or less government spending, and the balance of responsibility between the public and private sector. Instead, the fundamental issue of what it was all about seemed to be a point of contention. Newscasters described the bill that was finally passed into law as being focused on traditional infrastructure like roads, bridges, railroad networks, ports, and power lines. In this final form of the bill, “infrastructure” seems to be limited to structures and systems that carry people, goods, and energy from place to place. But in the initial draft, infrastructure had been much more broadly conceived. That proposal had included investments in social issues like education, child care, and health care, environmental issues like clean energy and climate resilience, as well as provisions to improve access and equity within each of these areas. In this initial version, the bill had portrayed infrastructure as a framework that could simultaneously repair deteriorating transport networks, solve climate change, and redress social inequities. The broad definition led to an uproar among conservatives, who claimed that only a fraction of the bill was devoted

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to “real infrastructure.”2 Why did the simple title of a law lead to such broad disagreements in what the law was about? And who was right? If one pauses to consider the diverse denotations and connotations of the word “infrastructure,” it becomes clear that the disagreements over President Biden’s infrastructure plan, and over what constitutes infrastructure in the first place, are a logical outcome of the ambitious work that this single term attempts to do. Cultural and environmental geographer Matthew Gandy notes that the term was first applied to railroad networks but has come to be much more broadly applied and has become “surprisingly malleable in relation to the development of different types of technical and organizational networks.”3 The word itself, with the prefix “infra” meaning “below,” suggests that it refers to structures that exist beneath or as foundation to the parts of the physical world that are ordinarily seen and used. The roads, rails, and runways beneath moving vehicles come to mind; also physically buried structures like sewers, power lines, and internet cables; as well as underlying supports of elevated structures such as the foundation of a house, the stilts holding up a floating city, and the unseen underground floors of the Pentagon or of the various university libraries where I conduct my research. These final two items gesture toward a broader view of infrastructures: the military systems housed in the Pentagon and the academic structures of a research library include much more than physical materials. They are knowledge infrastructures, defined by Paul Edwards, a leading scholar of infrastructure studies, as “robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions that generate, share, and maintain specific knowledge about the human and natural worlds.”4 As long as processes facilitated by infrastructures continue smoothly, the infrastructures themselves generally remain unseen. They become part of the “naturalized background” in which humans live, accepted (and expected, without question and generally without appreciation) simply as part of the environment.5 When infrastructures fail, however, they become unavoidably and painfully visible. Of course, damaged roads and broken bridges immediately and spectacularly disrupt the transit flows that they are intended to enable. But the same phenomenon of visibility through failure arises in more subtle scenarios. The foundation and basement of a 2 See, for example, the Washington Post article by Salvador Rizzo, “The GOP claim that only 5 to 7 percent of Biden’s plan is for ‘real infrastructure.’” The bill’s official name is “H.R.3684: Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed on November 15, 2021.” Some of the environmental and social programs from President Biden’s initial proposal were eventually voted into law in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. 3 Gandy, The Fabric of Space, 2. 4 Edwards, A Vast Machine, 17. 5 Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity,” 185.



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house are anything but flashy, yet small aesthetic flaws above—cracks or water marks, for example—can suggest trouble below that can strip the sense of comfort from the rooms above, regardless how appealing the interior decorations. A university library might be known for its lightfilled atrium or the vaulted ceilings of its reading room, but if a pandemic disrupts the workers who maintain order in the stacks, extending floor upon dimly lit floor deep underground, then the library’s function as an organized and accessible information system breaks down. When discussions of infrastructure also engage with the artistic medium that is the primary object of study for this book, more meanings and associations emerge. Film relies on diverse media infrastructures, defined as “situated sociotechnical systems” that support the distribution of various audiovisual media and that are constantly evolving with new technology.6 Moreover, film has played an important role within knowledge infrastructures since the 1890s, both in its ability to capture visual traces of the material world for future consideration, and in its display of visual information in ways that promote certain thoughts, affects, and behaviors. The filmic medium exhibits the mutual influence of knowledge infrastructures, media technologies, and social systems. It serves as a prime example for the idea of “co-production,” that is, it illustrates that “the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it.”7 Infrastructures are engaged in ongoing processes of mutual influence with the societies that produce them, and the knowledge and media infrastructures of film play a central role in this process. In the study of film and environment, infrastructures offer a helpful lens at multiple levels. Films render infrastructures visible. As the next chapters illustrate, films reveal aspects of built environments and forms of mobility that would be difficult to see or share in other media. At the same time, they rely on complex infrastructures off screen. Film requires energy and effort at all stages of production, distribution, and exhibition. Long before they are seen by an audience, films are embedded in a dense network of technologies and infrastructures: Brian Jacobson has emphasized the ways in which film studios function as “network nodes” that “illuminate the convergence of forms of scientific and technical knowledge; technologies, resources, and raw materials; and groups of people.”8 Given the present study’s focus on both materiality and creativity within filmic environments, a focus on infrastructures adds renewed emphasis on the material side of this spectrum—but the results extend beyond the purely physical underpinning of a film. As Jacobson asserts, his focus 6 7 8

Parks and Starosielski, “Introduction,” 4. Jasanoff, “The Idiom of Co-Production,” 2. Jacobson, “Introduction: Studio Perspectives,” 13.

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on the film studio yields insight into the “means through which the real becomes virtual, the material becomes immaterial, and profilmic becomes diegetic.”9 Jacobson’s study illuminates how filmic environments emerge within a tension between materially given and creatively imagined worlds. Beyond the studio, focusing on infrastructures turns the emphasis toward processes of distribution, support, and maintenance, while still attending to the process of creative storytelling that creates meaning and imagines new possibilities.10 While the first part of the book discussed ways in which the discourse of Heimat, especially when mediated through film, is subject to and exerts influence on environmental change in the physical, non-filmic world, this second part turns its attention to material aspects of filmic environments, while still acknowledging the interconnectedness between the material and the discursive. Infrastructure developments both influence and are shaped by the visions and stories that emerge on film. The chapters of this section examine how film operates in complex, multi-directional ways in tandem with infrastructural developments: infrastructures are required off screen, shown on screen, and are implied or creatively imagined as a backdrop to the dynamic status of the filmic space. Politicians might quibble over what counts as “real infrastructure,” but that question raises a moot point in the attempt to understand the infrastructures of film. In fact, the persistence of the question regarding what constitutes infrastructure is endemic to the concept; the question indicates that infrastructures are always already discursive as well as material, and this combination is particularly evident in the medium of film. Film serves as an infrastructure of visual environments that are both created by humans and independent of them; the tensions between materiality and human creativity inherent to film’s infrastructures are therefore closely related to the status of film as an archive of the Anthropocene. This section begins with an analysis of one of German film history’s most famous examples of infrastructure taking center stage in a film. The climax of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis centers on a crisis of failed infrastructure, and yet—perhaps unsurprisingly, given the tendency of infrastructure to go unnoticed—this central aspect has been remarkably absent from analyses of the film. Reconsidering the questions of infrastructure in Metropolis yields a new understanding of the film’s place not only within German infrastructural thinking, but within the broader archive of German ecological thought. The failure of infrastructure in Metropolis thereby comprises a key moment within the ecological archive of German cinema.

9 Jacobson, “Introduction: Studio Perspectives,” 10. 10 Parks and Starosielski, “Introduction,” 5.



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Metropolis as Ecological Archive11 When researching the filmic environment of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, frequently cited as the prototypical science fiction cityscape, a curious puzzle emerges. Lang’s comments about the inspiration for the film emphasize the verticality and bright lights he encountered on his first view of Manhattan in 1924. Scholarship on the film’s cityscape has likewise focused on skyscrapers, the influence of and discourse about New York, and the debate about skyscrapers in Germany. Yet events high above ground constitute a minority of the action: in the 2010 reconstruction, the film spends roughly equal amounts of time high above ground in the Eternal Gardens, offices, or apartments; at street level; and underground. This chapter asks: What is missed by focusing overwhelmingly on the above-ground cityscape, despite the complex layers of landscape within this key text of cinematic urban environments? How might a different focus yield new insights about the interplay between film, environments, and infrastructures? I argue that the upward focus in past scholarship has distracted from the equally dramatic ecological archive underground. This chapter aims to reopen that archive. In what follows, I use the framework of cinema as an ecological archive to analyze Metropolis and argue that Lang’s film serves as an archive for the manifold environmental relations of its time. A clear link between film archive and ecological archive arises through the film’s focus on massive engineering projects to control the physical environment, especially through the tunnels, caverns, and waterworks of the underground city. The ecological archive of Metropolis became even more evident when a nearly complete copy of the film was discovered in a Buenos Aires film archive in 2008. In the twenty-five minutes of new scenes that were added to the film in the 2010 reconstruction, the heavily scratched surface of the image reminds the viewer of the materiality of film and the impacts of non-human factors alongside deliberate filmmaking practices. Further, a significant portion of the newly restored scenes deal with the film’s underground spaces and climactic flood.12 Lang’s Metropolis is of course one of the most canonical films of German cinema, yet it is not generally considered as an environmental text. Canon formation and archival preservation tend to reflect power structures and dominant patterns of taste.13 Yet both archives and canons, even as they try to establish stable traditions, also contain the potential 11 Starting here, this chapter is adapted from an article first published in Colloquia Germanica under the title “Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive.” 12 Cf. “New Scenes Added,” n.p., in the online materials for The Complete Metropolis. 13 Cf. Kacandes, “German Cultural Studies,” 11–12.

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for destabilization through diverse interpretive possibilities. According to Jacques Derrida, the multiplicity of discourses within any text comprises “an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer assured.”14 Whatever the rationale for a document’s preservation or canonization, it might also yield insight into any number of conditions that influenced its creation—including relationships between humans and their environment. An ecological approach thus offers a chance to read the canon, but “read it slant,” to adapt Emily Dickinson’s (no less revolutionary than canonical) phrase, so that we might circle back through familiar works and reveal new layers of truth. After all, “success,” Dickinson assures us, “in circuit lies.”15 The analysis below considers four different areas of environmental discourse that are archived in Lang’s film. Two of these fields of discourse— the debate about skyscrapers in Weimar Germany and the interaction between environment and social tensions—have already received significant scholarly attention. The other two—rapidly expanding underground infrastructures of early twentieth-century Europe and notions about ecology and pollution that circulated around the time of the film’s release— have gone largely unnoticed, and will therefore receive the majority of the attention. Metropolis is sufficiently well known that I will forego a thorough plot summary. For the purposes of this analysis, it suffices to note that the film displays a city divided vertically into three distinct environments: wealthy businessmen live and work high up in skyscrapers, laborers and machines are buried underground, and the traffic and business of city residents circulate at ground level. A conflict between the skyscraper elites and the underground workers erupts through a riot in the machine halls, a flood in the underground city, and a reconciliation at street level. Past discussions of the environmental discourses in Metropolis, which provide some foundation for what I am describing as the ecological archive of the film, have focused on two primary areas: the relation of the film’s skyscrapers to the Weimar-era “Schrei nach dem Turmhaus,” or skyscraper mania, and the way in which the environments in the film create spatial symbols for social tensions. Dietrich Neumann’s 1994 essay on the cityscape of Metropolis set the tone for scholarly discussions of the film’s relation to skyscraper discourse in Weimar Germany. Neumann writes that “the film’s architecture is one of the few features that has not been analyzed in any detail up to now”16 and describes H. G. Wells’s review of the film as “the only analysis that dealt with Metropolis’[s] urbanistic 14 Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 11. 15 Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” 563. 16 Neumann, “Urbanistic Vision,” 146.



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vision in any detail.”17 Wells’s New York Times Magazine review of April 17, 1927 criticized the film for showing an outdated vertical vision of the city, when urban planners had long since abandoned the notion of growth upward in favor of sprawl outward into suburbs.18 Neumann responds by arguing that the film reflects the “skyscraper mania”—consisting of plans and debates, not predictions or realized projects—in Germany during the 1920s. As evidence, Neumann discusses parallels between leading architects’ visions for German skyscrapers and Erich Kettelhut’s revisions of his set design for the film.19 The gap that Neumann identified regarding scholarship on the architecture of Metropolis has largely been filled.20 In subsequent studies of the filmic environment, commentators have often focused on the relationships between Lang’s filmic cityscape and the film’s social structures. As Thomas Elsaesser points out, Lang does not endorse or reject verticality, but uses it as a “universally understood metaphor of social power.”21 Several essays have dealt with the city’s underground realm, often treating it metaphorically as a space of myth or oppression within the film’s vertically oriented symbolic structure. These analyses tend to argue that Lang’s filmic city combines “the verticalized cityscape of Manhattan with the mythic underworld of Paris and the contemporary concerns of Berlin.”22 The underground layers are marked on the one hand by the mysticism of the catacombs, and on the other hand by the social issues represented by the bell in the underground city’s central square. The bell’s base was patterned after a monument in Weimar, designed by Walter Gropius, that memorializes the murder of workers who had gone on strike in 1920 to 17 Neumann, “Urbanistic Vision,” 147. 18 Neumann, “Urbanistic Vision,” 148, cf. Wells, “Mr. Wells Reviews a Current Film,” 95. 19 Neumann, “Urbanistic Vision,” 149, 151–52, 155–62. 20 On the relation of Lang’s filmic city to literary science-fiction sources, contemporary American culture, and environmental catastrophes, see Bachmann, “Introduction,” 9; Jordanova, “Science, Machines, and Gender,” 179; and Dover, “The Imitation Game,” 283. Many essays discuss the relation between the film’s cityscape and Lang’s 1924 trip to the United States; two helpful examples include Bachmann, “Introduction,” 5–8 and Elsaesser, Metropolis, 19. Scholars have discussed additional contexts that are not detailed in Neumann’s essay, including the high-profile competition to design a skyscraper for the Friedrichstraße train station in 1921–22, as well as debates regarding workers’ housing that framed Weimar-era discussions of skyscrapers: see Elsaesser, Metropolis, 87; Kaes, “Metropolis,” 175–77; Schönemann, Fritz Lang, 78–80; and Elsaesser, “City of Light,” 92–96. 21 Elsaesser, Metropolis, 88. 22 Pike, Subterranean Cities, 283; cf. Elsaesser, Metropolis, 88; Anton Kaes, “Metropolis,” 175–76; Pike, “Kaliko-Welt,” 477.

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oppose the Kapp-Putsch. The bell thus displays in condensed form the sociopolitical tensions embedded into Metropolis’s vertical structure.23 The role of underground water has likewise been explained metaphorically: the continual rising, boiling, and bubbling water stands as a recurrent symbol for the rising social unrest of the oppressed masses.24

Metropolis and Infrastructures Past analyses have helpfully elucidated the architectural debates and symbolic implications of the urban landscape in Metropolis. But as a product of environmental discourses in 1927, Lang’s film serves as an archive for much more than just urban design discussions and social tensions. It also reflects and expands on realities on the ground, and underground, in Germany and around Europe. Underground tunnels, caverns, machines, and water systems create a massive infrastructure beneath the surface of the cinematic city in Metropolis. These elements of the filmic environment serve as an ecological archive of ideas inspired by the massive construction projects that underlay all of the European metropolises in which Fritz Lang had lived, studied, and worked. In the most famous review of the film, H. G. Wells derides Metropolis for its failure as a work of creativity: rather than imagining the future, Wells argues, the film shows technologies such as cars and airplanes that already exist. It then implants them onto a vertical notion of urban growth that may be visually impressive, but that had been abandoned by architects and urban planners decades before the film was made.25 Wells might have been more impressed if, rather than expecting a futuristic account of urban technologies, he had considered how Lang’s film reveals crucial technologies that are often hidden such as underground tunnels, structural supports, and sewers. In his search for flashy gadgets, Wells ignores the film’s infrastructures. Paul Edwards writes that “the most salient characteristic of technology in the modern . . . world is the degree to which most technology is not salient for most people, most of the time.”26 When we talk about technology, he continues, we usually mean high tech, while the vast majority of technologies—from foundational building blocks of culture such as ceramics, screws, and paper to “mature technological systems” such as roads and sewers—reside in a “naturalized background, as ordinary and unremarkable to us as trees, daylight, and dirt.”27 These 23 Cf. Neumann, “Urbanistic Vision,” 153. 24 Elsaesser, Metropolis, 26; Kaes, “Metropolis,” 185; Schönemann, Fritz Lang, 66. 25 Wells, “Mr. Wells Reviews a Current Film,” 94. 26 Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity,” 185. 27 Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity” 185.



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technological systems have become infrastructures; they are remarkable precisely because they are invisible. In Metropolis, H. G. Wells may not have seen anything new or futuristic, but he certainly saw technologies of the present that he was not accustomed to seeing. Raymond Bellour writes that “the focus of Lang’s mise en scène is so often vision itself,” a trait frequently exemplified in the figure of the detective seeking clues.28 Metropolis is not about searching for answers to a mystery; instead, it emphasizes vision by showing what is known but rarely seen or even acknowledged. It creates a visual archive of the often-invisible infrastructural layers of the city. Numerous developments in infrastructure history form the backdrop for the cinematic environment in Lang’s film. When Metropolis was released in Berlin in 1927, the city was undergoing a rapid transformation of its transportation, water, and power infrastructures. Historical studies of Berlin’s water systems describe challenges arising due to the simultaneous growth of other city projects, for example the construction of multiple new subway lines beginning in 1927.29 The water infrastructure at the center of the filmic city in Metropolis comprises an imagined archive of projects taking place in Berlin and across Europe. Building on major water engineering projects underway since the eighteenth century,30 the construction of elaborate and costly water infrastructure played a major role in efforts to modernize cities across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Environmental historian Frank Uekötter notes that “cities from Paris to Budapest were competing for the latest and best urban technology”; even today, “the quality of life and the attractiveness of the European metropolises rest not least on accomplishments from the turn of the century.”31 Fritz Lang had lived his formative years in some of the primary cities in which these infrastructure projects had been underway. He grew up in Vienna, and Patrick McGilligan writes that “the architecture of the city towered in Lang’s psychology. . . . The characteristic shots from high places, the extreme upward-slanting low angles, the lingering emphasis on the size and structure of massive buildings, the people dwarfed by walls or doors—these were a legacy that was distinctly Viennese.”32 When Lang left Vienna, he next settled in Paris, which Matthew Gandy describes as a classic example of the “plumbed city” in which “private and public realms have been regularized and separated.”33 Paris’s impressive sewers had entered the public consciousness through a 28 Bellour, “Fritz Lang,” 25. 29 Schug et al., Berliner Wasser, 136. 30 Cf. Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, 5. 31 Uekötter, The Greenest Nation? 41. 32 McGilligan, Fritz Lang, 6. 33 Gandy, The Fabric of Space, 6.

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prominent photography exhibit in the 1860s and public tours starting in 1867; they were a familiar sight long before Lang’s arrival in 1913.34 In 1918 Lang moved to Berlin. In 1920, the Groß-Berlin Gesetz (Greater Berlin Act) was passed; it vastly increased the land area and population of the city and called for unification of 21 distinct waterworks covering 46 municipalities. The system now included 1400 kilometers of water pipes and had an annual capacity of 40 million cubic meters of water. During the decade that followed, the capacity would increase to 256 million cubic meters, and by 1932 it would reach one million cubic meters per day.35 The furious expansion of the city’s water infrastructure did not occur without glitches. The city’s waterworks had just made it through a shortage of workers during the Great War. Then, in 1919, a general strike called by communists and left-wing Independent Social Democrats (USPD) was met a with a brutal response ordered by Gustav Noske, an official of the centrist Majority Social Democrats (MSPD), and carried out by right-wing Freikorps troops, causing some disruption to gas, water, and power supplies. Further, the general strike that followed the Kapp-Putsch in 1920—alluded to in Metropolis via the Gropius-inspired bell at the center of the workers’ city—led to interruptions of the water supply for some Berlin residents.36 Later in the decade, the rapid expansion of waterworks coincided with the development of subways as well as the growth of infrastructure for gas and electricity, leading to enormous costs as well as crowding and jostling for space beneath the surface of the city streets.37 Lang and his viewers had experienced the rapid growth of infrastructure and had witnessed its susceptibility to social and political upheaval. While interruptions to the water supply were limited in scope and brief in duration,38 they made it clear that political upheaval on the streets had consequences within the homes and apartments where people lived—especially for those workers who lived on the upper floors of apartment buildings, where reduced water pressure had its first impacts in the form of reduced or nonexistent water supply. Thus, the portrayal of social strife within a context of water infrastructure in Metropolis—and the fact that this conflict directly impacts the workers’ homes—would have been uncomfortably familiar to the first viewers of Metropolis. With all of these elements of the film and of Lang’s own experience in mind, it appears that the filmic environment in Metropolis draws much inspiration from European cities and underground infrastructures, not just from the glittering skyscrapers of New York. Why, then, did Lang 34 Gandy, The Fabric of Space, 33. 35 Schug et al., Berliner Wasser, 115–17, 126, 136. 36 Schug et al., Berliner Wasser, 105–6. 37 Schug et al., Berliner Wasser, 136. 38 Schug et al., Berliner Wasser, 105.



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ignore these underground environments in his written comments? As it turns out, he did not, even in his texts about the United States. Instead, his writings have been sampled selectively by critics (and by Lang himself). Commentators frequently discuss the travelogue that Lang published in Film-Kurier shortly after his return from America in December 1924.39 The text describes the glittering lights and shining skyscrapers of Manhattan; it plays into Lang’s “carefully cultivated myth” regarding the flash of inspiration that led him to create Metropolis.40 But this summary ignores half of the story. The full title of Lang’s article is “Was ich in Amerika sah: Neuyork—Los Angeles” (What I Saw in America: New York—Los Angeles). About half of the text deals not with New York towering upward, but rather with Los Angeles sprawling outward and digging downward. In another travelogue published shortly after the Film-Kurier article, Lang focuses entirely on this second form of urban expansion that he had witnessed in the United States. The article “Zwischen Bohrtürmen und Palmen: Ein kalifornischer Reisebericht” (Between Oil Rigs and Palm Trees: A California Travelogue) was published in the magazine Filmland on January 3, 1925. The report begins with a focus on oil derricks: “In the beginning, there was the oil rig. Then came the asphalt streets that sprawl miles and miles through dismal wastelands, always flanked by oil rigs growing wild. Then, for beautification of the surroundings, the palm trees are brought in.”41 Lang describes the roads as leading through a wasteland, and the palm trees are added as an ornamental afterthought: the primary element is the growing forest of oil rigs digging underground. When Lang arrived in Los Angeles, the city was three years into an oil boom that had begun with the discovery of three major oil fields in 1920 and 1921.42 Due to the “rule of capture” by which, according to United States law, oil belonged to whoever brought it to the surface—unlike in Germany, where oil belonged to the state 39 Lang’s travelogue was published in Film-Kurier on December 11, 1924. It was the first of three articles, all with the main title “Was ich in Amerika sah,” that Lang published in Film-Kurier about his trip to the United States. All three of these articles, as well as “Zwischen Bohrtürmen und Palmen” from the journal Filmland, can be found in the volume Die Stimme von Metropolis, edited by Fred Gehler and Ullrich Kasten. 40 Bachmann, “Introduction,” 5. 41 Lang, “Zwischen Bohrtürmen und Palmen,” 16. Since the idiomatic language and vocabulary of this quotation may be of interest to some readers and are difficult to accurately render in translation, I include the original German here: “Im Anfang war der Bohrturm. Dann kam die asphaltierte Straße, die sich Meilen um Meilen durch trostloses Oedland erstreckt, immer flankiert von den wild wachsenden Bohrtürmen. Dann, zur Verschönerung der Gegend, werden die Palmen angesiedelt.” 42 Tygiel, Los Angeles Swindle, 13–15.

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regardless of where it was located—and because land in Los Angeles was already divided into small plots owned by numerous individuals, a race of “town lot” drilling ensued. Wells were drilled side-by-side, with each landowner trying to profit individually from the underground resource.43 The landscape above the oil fields came to resemble a crowded forest of densely packed oil derricks stretching across entire neighborhoods.44 While the underground resource was oil, not water, the city nonetheless provided an image of frenzied development to gain wealth by controlling underground fluids, resulting simultaneously in a strange growth of vertical structures above ground. Past scholars have noted that the California portion of Lang’s trip was as important as New York for the development of Metropolis because of what Lang and Erich Pommer learned by visiting American film studios.45 Lang’s writings about the trip suggest that the landscapes and underground resources of Los Angeles, not merely the city’s film industry, played a significant role. Two years after Lang’s trip to America, publicity materials leading up to the release of Metropolis offer further evidence that the film’s underground elements merit close attention. One promotional article, written by UFA foreign publicity director Alfred Sander and published in the New York–based Motion Picture News, shows six images, five of which display underground spaces (fig. 3.1). The only above-ground photo shows Rotwang’s house—the most cave-like of above-ground spaces in the film. It is also the only image showing the sets still under construction, suggesting that the appeal of the city above ground lies in the impressive construction efforts rather than the completed filmic environment. Further, a striking continuity exists between the bottom left image, showing the mass of children struggling to climb the underground stairs to escape the flood, and the image showing Rotwang’s house. Identical vertical metal columns rise to the full height of the frame in both images. In the staircase image, two vertical columns occupy the foreground in the center and left of the image, pushing the main action of the scene—the children trying to escape death by drowning—into the background. In the image of Rotwang’s house, three vertical columns rise up in the center of the image; Rotwang’s house is essentially hidden behind them. In both cases, what appears to be the main focus of the scene is relegated to the background, thus foregrounding the role each physical space plays in supporting the towering structures that are suggested to exist above. The fact that these specific images were chosen to market the film suggests that underground infrastructure held a deep fascination and appeal for audiences; meanwhile, the skyscrapers that have dominated discussions 43 Tygiel, Los Angeles Swindle, 29. 44 Tygiel, Los Angeles Swindle, 30; Elkind, “Oil in the City,” 619. 45 Elsaesser, Metropolis, 19; Bachmann, “Introduction,” 8.



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Figure 3.1.  Infrastructures and underground spaces in Metropolis advertising. Sander, “Metropolis Likely to Be Sensation.”

about Metropolis are nowhere to be seen. All told, the underground imagery has been undervalued in the film, as has the film’s construction of a cityscape built around water infrastructure. Bearing this context in mind, a close analysis of underground scenes from Metropolis reveals a fictionalized archive of massive underground infrastructure projects. When Matthew Gandy writes about Berlin’s infrastructure in his book The Fabric of Space, he analyzes the 1930 semi-documentary Menschen am Sonntag, highlighting the film’s focus on transport connections between the urban center and the forests and lakes at the periphery.46 In contrast, Metropolis trains its gaze squarely on the center of the city—and as a result, the film offers an important supplement to the environmental discourses referenced in Menschen am Sonntag. Metropolis opens with an animated sequence that dissolves from the ornate art-deco title frame into a 10-second image of the city skyline, followed by the famous machine montage. In other words, after just 10 seconds of supposedly above-ground imagery, we are already underground with the machines and their operators. A minute into the film, the workers are shown at shift change in a windowless corridor or tunnel. The walls and ceiling consist of thick brick arches that seem to be supporting a heavy structure above. The tunnel serves several visual functions: first, it mirrors the portrayal of the humans contained within it. The low, vaulted arches angle down toward the hunched shoulders of the workers leaving their shift, and the tunnel’s disappearance into the darkness of the elevator emphasizes the lack of a goal or meaning that results from complete alienation between the laborers and the fruits of their labor. The workers 46 Gandy, The Fabric of Space, 72–78. Menschen am Sonntag and Gandy’s analysis are discussed in more detail in chapter 6 of the present study.

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move in the exact same formation—blocks of workers six deep and six across, clad in matching dark uniforms and hats, marching in synchronized, slow, plodding steps—that they will use shortly later in the film, when Freder, the film’s protagonist, witnesses an explosion in the machine halls. Following the explosion, Freder sees a hallucinatory vision of slavelike workers marching into the mouth of the Moloch machine, sacrificing themselves to the demonic god of industry. The opening tunnel, like the vast machine hall of the later scene, comprises an environment in which oppressive underground architecture determines the direction of human lives (fig. 3.2). According to Thea von Harbou’s novel of Metropolis, created simultaneously with the screenplay, a single device known as the heart machine lies at the center of the film’s infrastructure. The heart machine is a generator that provides power to all the machines of the city—there is “no machine in all Metropolis which did not receive its power from this heart.”47 Among the machines that thus receive power, many work to pump away water that would otherwise inundate the workers’ homes: It was said that a river wound its way deep under the city. Joh Fredersen had walled up its course when he built the subterranean city, the wonder of the world, for the workmen of Metropolis. It was also said that the stream fed a mighty water-basin and that there were pump-works there, which were powerful enough, inside of less than ten hours either completely to empty or to fill the water basin— in which there was room for a medium-sized city.48

The description employs the language of folklore or urban legend (“it was said that . . .”), thus lending an aura of mythical awe to the machines’ infrastructural function. Moreover, the workers’ city is labeled as “the wonder of the world.” Given the focus on skyscrapers in discussions of the cityscape of the film Metropolis, it is remarkable that this laudatory language from the novel does not describe the skyscraper city above, but rather the tenement-filled cavern below ground, made possible through extensive water infrastructure. H. G. Wells, as part of his scathing review of the film, suggests that the machines in Metropolis do not seem to do anything: “The machines make wealth. How is not stated. . . . One is asked to believe that these machines are engaged quite furiously in the mass production of nothing

47 Harbou, Metropolis, 123. The citations from Thea von Harbou’s novel are from a recent English-language publication of the novel. The passage regarding the heart machine and water pumps can also be found reprinted in Bachmann and Minden, eds., Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” 60. 48 Harbou, Metropolis, 128; cf. Michael Cowan, “The Heart Machine,” 240.



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Figure 3.2.  The workers’ tunnel in Metropolis.

that is ever used.”49 Wells was a contemporary author and critic, not a film scholar. The value of his comments lies not in the validity or error in his assessment of Lang, but rather, in what his comments—combined with his own filmmaking practice, explored in the brief discussion of his film Things to Come at the end of this chapter—reveal about environmental ideas in the Weimar era. Here, I discuss Lang’s and Wells’s responses to machines in Metropolis; later, I turn to what their seemingly distinct approaches to machines show about underlying understandings of nature and culture. Wells is correct that no product seems to be created by all of the machines in Metropolis. In fact, the machines reside, for most of the film, within what Edwards describes as the “naturalized background” of infrastructure.50 Wells criticizes the film’s portrayal of mechanical mass production, but he never considers that the machines might not be engaged in production at all. Their function becomes visible when the machines break down and, as a result, the underground city floods. While the script of Lang’s film does not explicitly state the function of the city’s machines as water infrastructure, the film’s visuals emphasize water infrastructure at multiple levels. At the diegetic level, the machines’ function can be deduced from the fact that the city floods immediately 49 Wells, “Mr. Wells Reviews a Current Film,” 95. 50 Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity,” 185.

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after the workers destroy the heart machine. Further, at the extradiegetic level, filming the flood scene required construction of an impressive offscreen network of water basins, pipes, and pumps. In other words, creating a diegetic scene of underground infrastructure failure required the creation of an extradiegetic, above-ground system of water infrastructure that would remain functional but unseen. In a production report published in the Berliner Zeitung (Berlin Newspaper) three days before the film’s premiere, production co-designer Otto Hunte describes the elaborate preparations made for the flood scene: One scene in which a trick shot was completely out of the question was the flooding, where the cement and iron concrete pavement of the streets is broken open and destroyed by the masses of water. The large quantities of water needed for this had to be dammed up and kept on a higher level in order to achieve the necessary pressure. For this purpose, four reservoirs with a capacity of 1,600 cubic meters were built, and in addition to that several smaller tanks for special shots.51

Based on his involvement in creating Metropolis, Hunte sees the flood scene as an example of the film’s impressive physical structures, not its special effects. Film critic Lotte Eisner agrees: Admirable, too, are the “documentary” techniques used for the flood-scenes, when the water spouting from the destroyed tanks mingles with the steel structures in the luminous mists, or when the surging flood nibbles at the asphalt in front of the workers’ barracks, and begins its gradual rise. Wherever the film concentrates on documentary and technological details, the private sentimentalism of the story is supplanted by genuinely dramatic effect.52

While most critics have described the underground scenes as mythic spaces or representations of political tensions in the film’s striated vertical vision, Eisner describes the underground flood sequence as “documentary”—showing events that really happened—and thus a counter-example to precisely the overblown pathos and symbolism that dominate much of the film. This contradiction embodies a tension not just within Metropolis, but within the filmic medium. Helmut Lethen has described film and photography as occupying a border position between indexical signs that document reality and creative products that are mediated, curated, or performed. According to Lethen, viewers often find themselves in the paradoxical position of knowing that they should be skeptical of the 51 Hunte, “My Work on Metropolis,” 81. 52 Eisner, Fritz Lang, 90.



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reality content of any media, including visual media; but nonetheless feeling an instinctive trust toward photography and film as supposedly unmediated and objective sources.53 The flooding scene exemplifies both sides of this tension. With its exaggerated acting and stylized architecture, the scene is clearly artificial and heavily mediated through many components of the filmmaking process. Yet the film also presents the viewer with a sense of materiality independent of the filmmakers’ agency: gushing water fills the massive basin and splashes at the legs of the children. In Thea von Harbou’s novel of Metropolis, the scene is described with exaggerated personification; the flooding water speaks to Maria in direct, threatening quotations.54 As a result, the overtly constructed expressionist style eliminates any sense of a realistic portrayal of events. But in the film, the materiality of the scene exists undeniably alongside its creative signification, reminding the viewer that the failed infrastructure created in filmic fantasy required very real and functional water infrastructure hidden off screen. As an ecological archive, the film records both the anxiety regarding infrastructure failure within the diegesis, and the impressive achievements of the extradiegetic water infrastructures captured simultaneously on screen.

The Future Was Now: Metropolis and Ecological Thought By providing an archive of fantasies and anxieties relating to water infrastructure, Metropolis also reveals patterns of ecological thought that helped to create Weimer-era environments. The film creates a world in which pollutants and pristine nature can be neatly segmented off from each other. Rather than everything being connected to everything else, to borrow from Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology,55 Lang’s film presents a world in which everything can be separated or diluted to minimize interaction. In 1920s Europe, separation and dilution were promoted as successful ways to mitigate pollution. In Sweden in 1928, the year after Metropolis was released, a 145-meter-high smokestack at a smelting plant was inaugurated as the tallest chimney in Europe.56 Build a smokestack—or a city—high enough, and the thinking was that the pollution would be rendered harmless through dilution. The same logic governed discussions of water quality. In 1927, a number of Dutch waterworks joined forces to fight pollution in the Rhine. Industrialists upstream in Germany thought 53 Lethen, Der Schatten des Fotografen, 14–16. 54 Harbou, Metropolis, 155–57. 55 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 29. 56 Högselius, Kaijser, and van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition, 298.

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this effort was not worth the trouble. As Karl Imhoff, the Managing Director of the Ruhr Cooperative, declared in 1928: “Except to protect the fisheries, there is no rationale whatsoever to do anything about the pouring of wastewater in the Rhine because its water volume is so large that it can absorb and cleanse the waste itself.”57 In discussions of air and water, concerns about pollution were assuaged simply by separating bodies that ought not to meet: if the polluting element is far enough away, and if enough water or air is flowing through the space, there is no cause for concern. Lang’s film shows a similar logic regarding pollution, and thus archives not only the physical structures of its time, but also the dominant ecological thinking of the era. The film ends with a flood, seemingly a sort of natural disaster, and yet all-out destruction seems to be the only environmental problem that the film can imagine. Pollution and contamination are absent; air and water flow cleanly through the shining city. There is smoke in the machine halls—indeed, when Freder attempts to take over the role of a worker during his initial descent into the underground city, he chokes on the smoke after entering the machine room. But he can contain the smoke by closing the door; it does not pollute the air outside, let alone the water beneath the city. In von Harbou’s novel, the text offers two brief glimpses outside the city—one when Josaphat escapes a plane crash and is nursed back to health in a rural setting, the other when Joh Fredersen, master of Metropolis, visits his mother in a farmhouse (complete with a walnut tree outside her reading window) that he has relocated to a rooftop in the city.58 Both of these idyllic scenes feature green vegetation, clear skies, puffy white clouds, and refreshing breezes. Within the context of the ecological archive of German cinema, these images call to mind the rural Heimat scenes discussed in chapters 1 and 2. They appear to be fully separate from the city—either above the din, or beyond the lateral borders. But both would certainly share a watershed and would be impacted by the city’s smokestacks. Bringing this discussion back to the question of Lang’s film as part of an ecological archive, we might ask: What histories and discourses are at work here? How do these images of pollution and dilution contribute to the film’s effect as a work of environmental storytelling? Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, two leading scholars of material ecocriticism, have written about modes of analysis that go beyond “the conventional ecological vision according to which everything is connected with everything else.”59 They suggest that non-human entities inscribe themselves into human discourses; agency is distributed among a “mesh” 57 Högselius, Kaijser, and van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition, 298. 58 Gunning, Films of Fritz Lang, 83. 59 Iovino and Opperman, “Introduction,” 5.



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of actors including non-humans alongside humans.60 Regarding Lang’s film, production reports emphasize the extensive efforts to contain and control the water required for the flooding scenes; meanwhile, the extras (largely children) were often chilled after long sessions of shooting while partially submerged in water, with little warmth—in the midst of a chilly fall of 1925—provided by the cavernous spaces of the UFA studios.61 The impressive final effect of the scene results from a combination of deliberate storytelling and filmmaking practices by Lang, von Harbou, and others, combined with the indelible imprint of the non-human agencies exerted by cold air and water. While these various people and forces seem to act independently, the multiple entities that shape a narrative are often intertwined. As theorists of transcorporeality have shown, the human body is itself subject to other forces and agencies; the body is “a material palimpsest in which ecological and existential relationships are inscribed.”62 But if there are multiple agencies at work in Metropolis, they seem to be limited to the macro level: humankind and machine; labor and capital; fire, water, and masses of human bodies. The idea of contamination between these elements is beyond the excessively stratified vision of the film. And once more, in this way the film was not of the future but precisely of the present. A surprising link with H. G. Wells helps us to appreciate the view of ecology that is archived in Metropolis. Less than a decade after Lang’s film was released, Wells was involved in a science-fiction film project that attempted a very different mode of environmental storytelling. In perhaps the ultimate statement of his disdain for Metropolis, Wells declared that for his 1936 science-fiction film Things to Come about a futuristic city called Everytown, “whatever Lang did in Metropolis is the exact contrary of what we want done here.”63 Wells therefore decided on an urban landscape in which there are no skyscrapers; instead, the surface of the earth has returned to a natural state and the city exists entirely within a “womb-like cavern” underground.64 Recalling that Wells had criticized Lang’s film for failing to imagine anything new, Things to Come might be construed as an attempt to replace the present-day technologies and environments of Metropolis with something more progressive or innovative, in line with Wells’s reputation as an author whose oeuvre displays “science fiction’s latent radicalism, its affinity for aggressive satire and

60 Iovino and Opperman, “Introduction,” 5; cf. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 28–30. 61 McGilligan, Fritz Lang, 118–19. 62 Iovino and Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism,” 2. 63 Neumann, “Urbanistic Vision,” 154. 64 Neumann, “Urbanistic Vision,” 154.

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utopian political agendas.”65 But while Wells’s womb-like caverns might seem like the opposite of Lang’s phallic skyscrapers, Lang’s and Wells’s urban visions are in fact closely related in their ecological implications. They both suggest that an ideal state of nature can thrive if only human industry is removed—whether on the rooftops or outside the city limits of Metropolis, or on the city-free surface of the earth in Everytown. These visions both call to mind the “natural climax” that contemporary scientists felt would be achieved in an ecosystem free of human impacts. There is not yet any hint of the dynamic and unstable status of ecosystems, a field of knowledge that would only gain traction in the 1950s.66 Within their moment in 1927 and 1936, both Lang and Wells envision an environment in which nature is preserved simply by keeping it separate from the blight of the city. The notion that pollution from the city might flow downstream is not considered.67 In its status as part of the ecological archive of German cinema, however, Metropolis’s denial of contamination becomes untenable. Even as the climactic scene seems to show the destruction of a cinematic city, the film conveys an overwhelming impression of grand infrastructural complexity that keeps the filmic image intact. The massive cinematic infrastructure of the extradiegetic world impinges on the space of the diegesis and reveals that Lang’s towering cityscape, no less than Wells’s underground world, can document ecological images and energies but cannot fully control the visual messages they will convey. In conclusion, the filmic environment of Metropolis is precisely of its time: not only in its reference to skyscraper debates and social tensions in Weimar Germany that past analyses have emphasized, but also in its portrayal of massive underground waterworks as sites of simultaneous fascination and anxiety, and in its display of idyllic peripheral spaces uncontaminated by the nearby urban center. Metropolis displays a cinematic environment largely determined by developments in infrastructure in Germany and around Europe; in terms of time on screen, the Manhattaninspired skyscrapers are a small but powerful minority. When attention is given to the street-level and underground landscapes, it becomes clear that the film is not merely an “allegory of the future as triumph of the machine,” as Tom Gunning has declared.68 It also reveals a fantasy of the city in Lang’s present moment, inspired by Berlin as much as New 65 Sterling, “Science Fiction.” 66 Mauch, “Introduction,” 5. 67 Other German urban films of the era could serve equally well. Both Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt and Menschen am Sonntag cut between the bustling pace of the city and idyllic recreational landscapes on the edge of town, with an emphasis on transit infrastructure that carries humans between these two otherwise distinct landscapes. 68 Gunning, Films of Fritz Lang, 55.



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York, without yet any awareness of the mutual entanglement of spaces within ecological systems. While H. G. Wells may be correct that the film offers little as an image of the future, it has much to offer as an ecological archive of Weimar Germany.

4: Image, Environment, Infrastructure: The Social Ecologies of the Bergfilm And what has become of our beautiful skiing? A little bit of a circus! . . . I did not want to call people to this modern mass enterprise of artificially prepared slopes, to this “get to the bottom as quickly and easily as possible”; that, at any rate, was not what I wanted to communicate to people back then.1 Alpine skiing was not a sport that was once in tune with nature and later became alienated from it by speed and sport; its transformation reflects an ideology in flux.2

T

German mountain film or Bergfilm3 has been a case for debate since director Arnold Fanck pioneered the genre in the 1920s.4 The films have been lambasted for displaying proto-fascist sentiments and for serving as the starting point for Leni Riefenstahl, several of her favored camera operators, and possibly the aesthetic approach that would define the most prominent works of filmic propaganda in Nazi Germany. They have been celebrated as pathbreaking works of nature documentary that set spectacular remote environments into motion and made them he

This chapter is adapted from an article published under the same title in the open-access online journal Humanities, as part of a 2021 special issue on Environmental Imagination and German Culture. See Peabody, “The Social Ecologies of the Bergfilm.” 1 Arnold Fanck, in his autobiography, as translated and reprinted in Haque, “Arnold Fanck,” 257. 2 Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 127. 3 In this chapter, I use the terms “Bergfilm,” “mountain film,” and “Alpine film” interchangeably. The German label Bergfilm has gained some degree of international acceptance, usually referring to the German mountain films of the 1920s and 30s, but sometimes to a broader definition of the genre. In one instance, the French Swiss film scholar Rémy Pithon defines le Bergfilm according to the political and heroic tendencies he sees within the German films of the interwar era. This political definition allows him to include similar films from other nations under the same heading. 4 Béla Balázs wrote an essay entitled “Der Fall Dr. Fanck” (The Case of Dr. Fanck) in 1931; the essay comments on the polarized reactions to the films that already existed in the 1920s and 30s.



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accessible for a mass audience. More recently, they have been analyzed as complex and contradictory works within the intellectual, social, and cinematic history of Weimar Germany. In all of these discussions, the genre’s eponymous Berg has remained remarkably flat and static. Critics have repeated claims that the mountain emerges as a main character or actor in the films, but unlike for any other actor in the genre, the history of the mountain beyond the scope of the film has been unworthy of interest. This oversight is worth addressing, given that the mountains themselves, not only the film industry and the social-political context, were developing rapidly. How were the mountains changing during the era in which the mountain films flourished? What role did the films play in these changes? This chapter argues that German mountain films, especially in their brief heyday starting one century ago, served as a creative catalyst for the development of Alpine tourist infrastructure. Filmic aesthetics imaginatively amplified and accelerated developments in Alpine tourism infrastructure that had been underway for decades. The social ecology model of environmental history provides a framework for considering the interplay between nature and culture: while these two fields are inseparable from each other, social change must be impacted through acts of communication, whereas changes to the physical environment require physical forces. As scholars associated with the Vienna school of environmental history point out, “nature is not susceptible to cultural or symbolic action”—words do not directly change environments, but rather impact physical landscapes only indirectly (for example, by inspiring changed behavior among humans who then impact the environment through their actions), so the social-ecological approach provides a way to understand how symbolic communication gives rise to physical action.5 Further, as discussed in this book’s introduction, film is a particularly potent force within the social-ecological system. The dense network of social, perceptual, and material relations involved in the creation and reception of film intensifies the impact that a cultural idea can have on the physical world.6 By capturing visions of Alpine landscapes, tourist activities, and expert athletic endeavors and then fusing them together with dynamic editing, thus making full use of the transformative possibilities within filmic space, mountain films visualized an accelerated mode of tourism that would require new infrastructures and technologies in order to be realized in the physical environment. Mountain films offer a case study in film’s status 5 Fischer-Kowalski and Weisz, “The Archipelago of Social Ecology and the Island of the Vienna School,” 21. 6 This discussion draws on Adrian Ivakhiv’s process-relational model. See the present volume’s introduction and Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image, 341.

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as an ecological archive that simultaneously documents material environments and creatively manipulates them: While the genre’s images seem to celebrate a timeless Alpine landscape, the Bergfilm serves as a catalyst for processes modifying that environment. The cinematic genre of Bergfilm was popular in Germany from roughly 1920 until 1940. While films focused on mountains continue to be made today, the German genre is unique for its sustained mass popularity over two decades as well as its blend of bold mountaineering feats and fictional melodramatic plots. The German genre is also remarkable for how its heroic portrayal of mountaineering resonated within the historical context of rising fascism in Germany; as a result of this context, and due to the success that mountain-film directors, especially Leni Riefenstahl, had in the Nazi film industry, much of the early critical reception of Bergfilm focused on political implications of the films. Arnold Fanck was the leading director of the genre through the Weimar years. From the beginning, reviewers and commentators tended to “praise the mountain film’s images and scoff at its scenarios.”7 With regards to Der heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain, dir. Fanck, 1926), one of the two films analyzed below, this was certainly the case. One reviewer describes the film’s images as being among the most beautiful that had ever been created, but laments that this beauty is “destroyed” and “trivialized” by the plot.8 Siegfried Kracauer’s review of the film praises the film’s images but describes them as being overtaken by the “malevolent spirit (Ungeist) of the story.”9 A review by Fritz Rosenfeld in the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers’ Newspaper) likewise praises the film as a “great tragic symphony” of nature images, then adds that this symphony “also has a plot. Unfortunately.”10 Regarding the genre as a whole, the polarized responses are most famously articulated by Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer. Balázs describes Fanck in a 1931 essay as the greatest filmmaker of nature, writing that he brought nature into the films as a living being, and that he gave nature a countenance, thus creating art.11 Balázs notes that others had made nature films, but Fanck was the first to feature nature as an active presence and participant. Siegfried Kracauer, in his discussion of Arnold Fanck’s films in his book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, likewise begins his discussion of the Bergfilm genre by praising the films’ images of glittering glaciers and billowing clouds. He then abruptly changes tone, condemning the 7 Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity,” 141. 8 Eggebrecht, “Der heilige Berg,” 208. 9 Kracauer, “Der ‘heilige’ Berg,” 299. Cf. Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity,” 148. 10 Rosenfeld, “Der heilige Berg,” 208. 11 Balázs, “Der Fall Dr. Fanck,” 287–91.



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films for their heroic plot lines.12 The films celebrate blind loyalty and eschew rational thought; for Kracauer, the mythic cult of the mountains blends smoothly into the Führer-cult of fascism. Kracauer’s critique set the tone of Bergfilm criticism for decades, with the most influential extension to his argument arising in Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism,” which finds a shared aesthetic in Fanck’s heroic Alpine scenes and Leni Riefenstahl’s epic propaganda films and describes the former as “an anthology of proto-Nazi sentiments.”13 More recently, since the 1990s, critics have desisted from simply defending (as Balázs) or attacking (as Kracauer) the Bergfilm. A number of scholars have emphasized the films’ links to technological and aesthetic modernity.14 Others have analyzed the mountain films alongside broader developments in tourist activities within Weimar society, especially with regards to questions of gender and class,15 and have considered the genre’s position within questions of film genre, aesthetics, and intellectual history.16 Two recent studies examine the genre’s relation to intellectual history with regards to concepts of nature, human history, and time: Alex Bush analyzes the films Stürme über dem Montblanc (Storms Over Mont Blanc, 1930) and SOS Eisberg (SOS Iceberg, 1933) and argues that the films’ emphasis on changes and shocks within the environment displays a distinctly modern sense of time that yields a historicized view of nature.17 Nicholas Baer analyzes the film Der heilige Berg and discusses the film’s complex interactions with ideas of nature, culture, and history to argue that it presents the Alps as an unstable landscape imagined within a “dialectic between technology and the perception of nature.”18 These recent assessments begin the project that I seek to continue with the present chapter, namely, a closer analysis of the Berg that is the defining feature of the mountain film. The Bergfilm genre contributed to modern Alpine tourism through its popularization of the sport of skiing as well as its aesthetics of speed. By creating new ways of seeing the Alps while also helping to build a culture of tourism that led viewers to visit the mountains in person, it 12 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 111–12, 258; Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity,” 139. 13 Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 76. 14 Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity,” 145; Morris, Modernism and the Cult of Mountains, 95; Brandlmeier, “Sinngezeichen und Gedankenbilder,” 80; Baer, “Natural History,” 283. 15 Nenno, “Postcards from the Edge,” 70; O’Sickey, “The Cult of the Cold,” 378; Holt, “Mountains, Mountaineering and Modernity,” 246. 16 Moltke, No Place Like Home, 46–52; Strathausen, “Image as Abyss,” 172; Baer, “Natural History,” 280. 17 Bush, “Moving Mountains.” 18 Baer, “Natural History,” 285.

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contributed to the rise of infrastructure on the seemingly natural landscapes it celebrates. Of course, it would be flawed to think that film brought modernity to a previously untouched landscape, since humans have inhabited and made use of the Alps for millennia, and by the early twentieth century, Alpine tourism had already brought numerous changes to the region. Further, the onset of modernity in the Alps was met with resistance and conflict. Similar to the growth of infrastructure across Europe, efforts to modernize the Alpine landscape “must be viewed as a highly volatile, ambiguous, and contested development.”19 The celebration of tourist landscapes on film thus constituted a new and unique intervention within a dynamic and conflicted process of environmental change in the Alps. For centuries before the advent of film, authors and artists had been imagining and communicating new uses of the mountain landscape through literary and visual representations. Furthermore, infrastructures supporting travel and tourism in the Alps had been expanding since the eighteenth century. Ernst Bloch’s 1930 essay “Die Alpen ohne Fotografie” (The Alps Without Photography) makes it clear that by three decades into the twentieth century, mountain images were extremely familiar to urbanites far from the Alps—only a saturation with touristic images would have compelled Bloch to wonder what it would be like to see the mountains for the first time, unmediated, without having already seen countless reproductions.20 In fact, mass contact with the Alps as a tourist landscape extends back far earlier even than photography. Texts from the eighteenth century began to create a canon of mountain literature and included such works as the 1732 long poem “Die Alpen” by Albrecht von Haller and the novel Julie, or the New Heloise by JeanJacques Rousseau, first published in 1761; then, Johanna Spyra’s Heidi books propelled the popularity of Alpine stories to new heights in the late 1800s. These literary works, as well as the romantic landscape paintings that flourished during the same time period, portray nature-oriented life in the mountains as a pristine and timeless refuge or an alternative to purportedly immoral modern civilization. In the nineteenth century, the sport of mountaineering added another element to the industry of mountain media: British mountaineers published accounts of Alpine expeditions and summit races in pursuit of first ascents, while a flurry of new guidebooks led travelers through Alpine tourist destinations.21 From the mid-nineteenth century onward, expeditions to the Alps yielded photographs as well as landscape paintings and written accounts. 19 Högselius, Kaijser, and van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition, 23. 20 Bloch, “Die Alpen ohne Photographie,” 498. 21 Mathieu, Die Alpen, 131–35.



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In the first decades of the twentieth century, new uses of visual media created additional connections between art and tourism. Arnold Fanck and Hannes Schneider developed innovative techniques for using photography to teach skiing in their 1925 book Wunder des Schneeschuhs (Wonders of Skiing).22 Modernist aesthetics also played a role in portrayals of the Alps: Whereas Romantic paintings had accentuated the grand sublime feelings associated with the Alpine landscapes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, twentieth-century artists such as Albin EggerLienz and Alfons Walde added modernist abstraction, culminating in the “Alpine modernism” that Andrew Denning locates above all in the discourse surrounding Alpine skiing.23 As different types of media were popularizing the Alps for potential tourists, new infrastructure projects were making them more accessible and comfortable for those with the resources to visit in person. Major Alpine roads had already been developed, for military more than touristic reasons, under the auspices of Napoleonic France between 1796 and 1810. As tourism developed, the first major tunnels opened between 1854 and 1882, including the Semmering, Mont Cenis, and Gotthard tunnels. The resulting train lines massively reduced the travel time required to access the Alps during the nineteenth century.24 Once tourists arrived at their destinations, they continued to have access to the latest technologies, since tourist resorts were among the first locations to install electricity. St. Moritz installed electric lights in 1879, two years before the International Exposition of Electricity in Paris.25 During the same period that visual and written media were rendering the Alps as a desired aesthetic landscape and tourist destination, infrastructure likewise created a new sense of accessibility, both through the speed of travel and the comfort after arrival. Such developments attract attention as technological marvels when they are new, but soon, they join the ranks of established infrastructures, at which point—as infrastructure scholar Paul Edwards notes—they are significant precisely because they are not noticed.26 In this case, the massive investments in travel infrastructure created a situation by 1930 in which Ernst Bloch could see the Alps as a space that is accessible by default, in which it takes a deliberate effort to imagine them as something distant and unknown. This discussion should not be read as a story of steady, unimpeded growth: historian Jon Mathieu points out numerous instances in which 22 Groß, Die Beschleunigung der Berge, 88. 23 Sieberer, “Der ‘Lebensraum Großstadt’ als Bedingung für die Malerei in der Region”; Denning, Skiing into Modernity. 24 Mathieu, Die Alpen, 165–67. 25 Mathieu, Die Alpen, 172. 26 Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity.”

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conflicts emerged during the rise of the tourism industry and the modernization of the Alpine landscape. In one instance, the Austrian province of Vorarlberg banned tourism after World War I to preserve food supplies for local residents. In another example, repeated referenda in the Swiss canton of Graubünden banned automobile travel for more than two decades in the early twentieth century. The government initially banned cars in 1900, and it took 25 years and at least 10 referenda on the topic before the ban was overturned.27 These contradictions lead Mathieu to argue that historians studying “modernity” in the Alps must first respond to the question, “which modernity?”28 Still, it is undeniable that mountain tourism expanded dramatically during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is equally clear that the growth of Alpine media and Alpine tourism created a cycle of mutual reinforcement, in which increasing textual and visual media drove interest in tourism, and increasing visits to the Alps led to ballooning lists of new visual and written media. Different media had different impacts within this process: the interplay between media and landscape accelerated with the advent of film. The rest of this chapter aims to understand the aesthetics behind this acceleration more closely, especially the pivotal role played by the Bergfilm genre.

From Heilige Berge to Der heilige Berg: Gustav Renker and the Bergfilm As discussed above, the mountain film genre emerged within a long history of media depicting the Alps. But which media provided the most immediate background to the mountain film genre? And with an eye to the mutual influences and impacts between cultural products and physical environments, what changed when the Alps were rendered on screen rather than in text? Discussions of German mountain film often mention the diverse connections to visual art traditions such as romantic landscape painting, expressionism, and new objectivity.29 In terms of literature, the discussion is less robust: Assessments of Bergfilm set the genre into the longer genealogy that runs from Heimat art and literature of the late nineteenth century to the Heimat films of the 1950s, with literary points of contact in Heimat novels by authors such as Ludwig Ganghofer

27 Mathieu, Die Alpen, 166; Schwarzenberg, “Der Kampf ums Automobile”; Simonett, “Die verweigerte Automobilität,” 37. 28 Mathieu, Die Alpen, 163. 29 Baer, “Natural History,” 284–85; Brandlmeier, “Sinngezeichen und Gedankenbilder,” 72–77; Jacobs, “Visuelle Traditionen des Bergfilms”; Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity,” 147.



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and in mountain novels by authors such as Gustav Renker.30 One surprising lacuna in these genealogies involves specific texts that are known to have served as background for multiple films. Ludwig Ganghofer is the best-known author of Heimat literature and is frequently mentioned in such discussions, but Gustav Renker—an author whose works were very popular in the 1920s through the 1940s but who is little known today— provided the literary foundation for at least two well-known mountain films. It is widely acknowledged that Renker’s novel Heilige Berge (Holy Mountains) provided the title for Fanck’s 1926 film Der heilige Berg, and Renker’s novel Bergkristall (Mountain Crystal) provided the plot for Leni Riefenstahl’s 1932 Das blaue Licht. Although Bergkristall has received some discussion, especially because Riefenstahl denied any knowledge of the book, to my knowledge no past studies have considered Heilige Berge as a potential source of insight into Fanck’s film, despite the fact that Fanck is known to have drawn inspiration from Renker’s novels and described Renker in a letter as “a Swiss writer, who wrote very good novels about mountains.”31 Since Renker’s novels are examples of popular or even trivial literature that display anti-modern sentiments and thinly veiled völkisch undertones, the lack of attention they have received is understandable—but they are worth a brief glance for their contribution to the media history, and consequently the environmental history, of the Alps. Renker was born in Vienna to a Swiss father and Austrian mother. He studied philology and music in Vienna, culminating in a PhD, then went on to careers as a musician, theater music director, and journalist in various cities in Germany and Austria before retiring to the mountains of Switzerland. As such, his background aligns with the elite academic circles that were prominent in mountaineering during the late 1800s and early 1900s, and also parallels the educational background of Dr. Arnold Fanck, who studied geology before becoming a prominent director of mountain films. Renker’s first literary success was his memoir Als Bergsteiger gegen Italien (Against Italy as a Mountaineer),32 based on his work as a journalist on the Alpine front of World War I. Like Fanck’s films—and also Ganghofer’s literary works—Renker’s novels portray the Alps as a “therapeutic topography,” a healing landscape and refuge from the pressures of modern urban life,33 but with critical differences regarding the narrative and aesthetic links with modernity.

30 Moltke, No Place Like Home, 44–45; Höfig, Der deutsche Heimatfilm, 143; Rapp, Höhenrausch, 30; Baer, “Natural History,” 286–87. 31 Zsuffa, Béla Balázs, 454; cf. Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion, 32. 32 Renker, Als Bergsteiger gegen Italien. 33 Moltke No Place Like Home, 36–37.

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Although ideological and political critiques of mountain films are not the central focus of the present study, it is worth noting that Renker’s novels add intriguing layers of complexity to the much-discussed topic of the relationships between mountaineering, mountain films (or novels), and fascism. Renker’s works display anti-modern and heroic ideals that fit well with the expectations of the literary market under National Socialism in Germany, and his novel Heilige Berge (first published in 1921) ranked thirty-fourth among the bestselling novels in Nazi Germany, just behind Ganghofer’s Das Schweigen im Walde (The Silence in the Forest).34 As Wilfried Wilms has pointed out, Renker’s “ideal of masculinity,” typified in the mountaineer/fighter after World War I, “closely resembled the desires of the ultra-nationalistic forces of Germany’s shaky democracy.”35 His writings thus reinforce the ideological critiques of the Bergfilm genre that he helped to inspire. However, the easy thematic alignment of his novels with Nazi ideals belies a more complicated relationship. After the start of World War II, Renker withdrew from the German book market and published only with Swiss presses through the end of the 1940s.36 The ambivalent relationship is explicitly thematized in his first literary work, Als Bergsteiger gegen Italien. Near the end of the book, he describes his experience at an Austrian village festival commemorating a military victory from 117 years earlier. He writes: “Without the least sympathy for the Austrian monarchy as a political structure—for the democratic Swiss citizen that would be unthinkable—this wondrous notion of German existence, of German Alpine peoples drew me here and showed me to my place among the Austrian military uniforms, whose concern is also my concern: Germanness.”37 This quotation explicitly states a militaristic and racialized affinity with German nationalist sentiments despite—indeed, in spite of and without any seeming contradiction against—internationalist and democratic identities. The book thus states explicitly the deeply problematic and contradictory political positioning of heroic portrayals of mountaineering. Of primary interest for the present study is Renker’s novel Heilige Berge. At first glance, the novel seems to hold little in common with Fanck’s 1926 film Der heilige Berg. While both involve protagonists who go the mountains to heal or escape from the complexities of the modern world, and while both involve love triangles and climactic climbing scenes, the characters and key plot elements are quite different. Fanck’s film focuses on tourists and mountaineers in an Alpine resort, whereas Renker’s protagonist is an engineer at a dam-building project near an 34 Schneider, “Bestseller im Dritten Reich,” 85. 35 Wilms, “From ‘Bergsteiger’ to ‘Bergkrieger,’” 231. 36 Gradwohl-Schlacher, “Renker, Gustav.” 37 Renker, Als Bergsteiger gegen Italien, 70.



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Alpine village. The novel’s conflict is triggered by tensions between the local Swiss village population and a new settlement of Italians who are brought in as laborers on the dam. The workers are portrayed as unrespectful, disruptive, and slovenly, a xenophobic and at times racist portrayal displaying hostility toward a nationally defined and racialized “other” that is constructed as an opposing pole to the identification with Deutschtum described above. This cast of characters bears little directly in common with Fanck’s film. There is, however, one intriguing connection between the engineer protagonist in Renker’s novel and the two leading male roles in Fanck’s film. Eight minutes into the film, when the two characters are first seen, intertitles describe them as “‘the Friend,’ Engineer Louis Trenker” and “Vigo, Ernst Petersen, student of medicine.” These textual fragments suggest that science and engineering are relevant for the film, even if they have no part in the overt action on screen. Just before the two friends appear, an intertitle describes them as “two men from the mountains.” Immediately after this title frame, they are seen in a long, low-angle shot as they stand perched atop a stone spire that they have climbed. The juxtaposition of mountaineering endeavors and scientific professions suggests a connection between these two fields of activity. This sequence aligns with recent suggestions by environmental historians that the engineering gaze and the tourist gaze are nearly interchangeable.38 Both arrive from outside and take the visual measure of a local landscape; both render a physical environment as commodity. Building on this insight, one can appreciate how Renker’s novel opens up a new way of understanding Fanck’s film. Renker’s novel describes a dam-building project; Fanck’s film displays a grand hotel and a ski resort: The engineering focus in the novel seems to have disappeared in the film. As the natural scientist Dr. Fanck, a geologist by training, adapted a plot from the humanist Dr. Renker, the natural sciences seem to become decentered. I argue, however, that as the tourist takes over the role of the engineer, the vision and motion enacted through the tourist/skier, and enabled by the medium of film, take on the processes of mechanization that had previously been overtly thematized through the engineer.

Der heilige Berg Der heilige Berg tells the story of two young male friends, one named Vigo (played by Ernst Petersen) and another laconically labeled “the Friend” (Luis Trenker), who both fall in love with the same woman, a 38 Dalmasso, “L’ingénieur, la Houille Blanche et les Alpes,” 31; Speich, “Wissenschaftlicher und touristischer Blick.”

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dancer named Diotima (Leni Riefenstahl). The friends are mountain climbers, and they first encounter Diotima as she performs at the Grand Hotel in the valley after they have completed a climb together. Both men are instantly enamored of the dancer and pursue her affections. As the film continues, Diotima’s relationship with the Friend is played out through joint outings on skis, Diotima’s pathos-laden performances of modern dance, and the friend’s solo mountaineering feats. Meanwhile, Diotima and Vigo laugh and frolic amidst the mass of ski tourists on the lower slopes. Crisis strikes when the Friend, after descending from one of his solitary Alpine adventures, sees Diotima with another man, whom he does not yet realize is his friend Vigo. In a fit of self-destructive jealous rage, he sets out on a winter ascent of the treacherous “Santo North Face” during bad weather. He insists that Vigo, his best friend, join him for the expedition. The two climb together into the night, finally arriving on an icy ledge. Here, the Friend finally recognizes Vigo as his rival for Diotima’s affection. He lurches threateningly toward Vigo, causing him to back away and fall from the ledge. The Friend comes to his senses in time to hold the rope with Vigo dangling below. Without a solid anchoring point, however, he cannot raise Vigo back over the ledge. He now realizes that his highest duty is loyalty: He must save his companion or die trying. Down in the valley, Diotima’s dance in the Grand Hotel is interrupted by news that the two friends have not returned from their climb. Diotima pleads for volunteers to attempt a rescue, and when none in the audience will meet her gaze, she herself ascends to the cabin where a group of Alpine athletes have gathered for their evening revelries. A rescue attempt ensues, but Vigo has already frozen to death, and as dawn breaks and the rescuers approach from below, the Friend also plunges to his death. Despite a plot that centers around the mountains as a site of sublime sentiments and a battleground for humans to struggle against the primal forces of nature, the film’s landscape is by no means a pristine wilderness. The Grand Hotel and a man-made ski jump feature prominently in the film, showing a landscape that is “a means to an end” and that has been modified to “[serve] a wide range of constituencies, from Alpine skiers and mountain dwellers to hoteliers and investors.”39 Furthermore, special effects and massive constructed sets are used at key moments, including the superimposition of a mountain over the sea that serves as the film’s establishing shot, the towering ice cathedral near the film’s conclusion, 39 Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 169. In the passage cited here, Denning discusses postwar landscape modifications in Chamonix. While the context is different in Switzerland, where Fanck filmed the Alpine scenes for Der heilige Berg, the film likewise shows significant landscape modification in service of tourism and sport.



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and the studio-created icy ledge featured in the climax. A number of Fanck’s later films display a fascination with technological instruments shown on screen such as airplanes flying over the Alps, a massive telescope in a high-tech observatory, and a weather station outfitted with numerous electronic instruments for measuring the weather and communicating with the valley below. Contemporary reviewers celebrated the “synthesis of mountains and machines” represented by the Bergfilm.40 In Der heilige Berg, Fanck’s modernism arises less through the technological instruments seen in the film’s images than through the editing that stitches them together.41 Fanck himself described the static quality of the mountains as the primary challenge of filming in the Alps: The landscape lacked motion, so as a filmmaker, he needed to find ways to create it.42 This perspective explains a seeming contradiction between text and image at the outset of Der heilige Berg. An opening scrolling text declares that the stunts and landscapes shown are all authentic, but immediately afterward, the first image of the mountains is shown as a special effect: a jagged peak superimposed over a rocky ocean coastline. Fanck claims that the technology of the camera was required for nature to gain expression;43 he thus implies that there is no contradiction between the text’s assertion of authentic mountain landscapes and the subsequent cinematically manipulated images. Reviewers were convinced by this fusion of cinematic manipulation and physical landscape. Fritz Rosenfeld writes that “the sea, the mountains, the snow, the sun shrouded in fog, the moon that has been dipped into clouds, the frenzied speed of skiing (which is assimilated into the natural events and is fully equivalent to the descent of an avalanche in its effect), the wayward torches in the nighttime snowfield, the morning over the mountains, the innumerable sparkles in the ice crystals—all of this is the material of the film art.”44 Beyond explicitly stating that skiing is equal to the “natural events” of the film, the review also creates equivalence through its syntax by inserting the skiing and torch procession as two items sandwiched between seemingly natural images. The review thus provides evidence that Fanck’s film inspires a view in which touristic activities (and the technologies and infrastructures that enable them) are integrated into the Alpine landscape. Whereas in Renker’s novel, mountains are transformed by engineers within the story, Fanck’s editing as well 40 Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity,” 145; cf. Morris, Modernism and the Cult of Mountains, 42. 41 Brandlmeier, “Sinngezeichen und Gedankenbilder,” 72; Baer, “Natural History,” 284. 42 Fanck, “Die Zukunft des Naturfilms,” 152; cf. Rapp, Höhenrausch, 78–91. 43 Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity,” 146. 44 Rosenfeld, “Der heilige Berg,” 209.

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as comments by Fanck and reviewers suggest a view in which transformation of the mountains through the technology of the moving image is an inherent part of the Alpine landscape. Historian Andrew Denning has compellingly argued that skiing served as the emblem of modernity in the Alps through its fusion of unbridled speed and the seemingly unmediated experience of nature. Denning points out that mountain films—especially the ski films made by Arnold Fanck with star skier Hannes Schneider— emphasized speed and athleticism rather than scenery: “the skiers, not the mountains, are the stars.”45 Denning rightly points out that Fanck’s films contribute to the obsession with accelerated motion in the mountains. The reviewers quoted above suggest equivalency between the motion of skiing and the movement of the landscape captured on film, suggesting a mindset among viewers in which the development of ski films and the growth of the Alpine ski industry are of a piece. With this background in mind, we can revisit one of the most familiar of the mountain films, Der heilige Berg, to find surprising ways in which it contributes to the ecological archive of German cinema. In Der heilige Berg, a sequence displaying a ski race takes up ten minutes of screen time in the middle of the film. The sequence displays numerous shots of skiers zooming downhill, aligning with contemporary portrayals of downhill skiing that emphasized speed and athleticism, in contrast to the solitude and beautiful landscapes emphasized in discussions of touring skiers.46 The scene sweeps viewers into the action through what Noël Carrol calls the “churning stomach sensations” of action scenes.47 While Carrol uses this as a counterexample against his primary focus on emotion in film, David Ingram explores the role of affect in greater detail, describing the physical response to an action scene as an example: affect consists of “a viewer’s automatic, visceral response to a film, whereas ‘emotion’ includes a cognitive element in addition to this bodily feeling.”48 The bodily sensation inspired by the ski race in Der heilige Berg is one of thrillingly speedy descent. Intriguingly, however, this affective realm creates a sensation that seems to contradict the known facts of the scene: the text that introduces the sequence makes it explicitly clear that the race is not an example of downhill skiing. The ski race is described in the German intertitles as a Dauerlauf and translated into English as a “long-distance run.” Such races were a major event in the Arlberg region where Fanck filmed many of the ski sequences for his films. To think of them as primarily downhill would be far from the mark: They involved extensive climbing and cross-country as well as 45 Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 103. 46 Groß, Wie das 1950er Syndrom in die Täler kam, 112. 47 Carroll, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” 26. 48 Ingram, “Emotion and Affect in Eco-films,” 23.



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downhill portions, and often took hours to complete. One competition, the third annual “Arlbergrennen” (Arlberg race) in 1906, covered 16.5 kilometers of distance and required competitors to climb a total of 1140 meters.49 Yet in the “long-distance run” shown in Der heilige Berg, the vast majority of the footage shows skiers speeding downhill. Some shots display a sharp turn or gravity-defying jump, but the visual energy comes not through the athletic feat itself but through the rhythmic repetition, either through numerous skiers making the same turn one after another, or through rapid cuts between short takes of numerous skiers going over a jump. Other shots show skiers at closer range zooming toward, and past, the camera; or the skiers are seen from behind as they shoot past the camera and continue down the mountain and off the edge of the frame. These images draw attention to offscreen space, thus emphasizing the vastness of the Alpine slopes as well as the speed with which the skiers traverse that space.50 In contrast to these images that emphasize the static camera’s inability to contain the speed of the skiers within the frame, other shots emphasize motion through the use of a camera mounted on skis, a technological feat that exemplifies Fanck’s simultaneous fascination with mountain sports and camera technologies.51 As a whole, the ski race sequence displays the “continuous movement” that was the hallmark of Fanck’s ski films, with a sense of motion achieved through the juxtaposition of numerous shots displaying movement across the frame, rather than through any sense of continuity from one shot to the next.52 Despite the race’s designation as a long-distance (and, we can safely assume, uphill as well as downhill) event, Fanck’s choice of shots and editing creates an overwhelming focus on rapid downhill portions. Contemporary reviews indicate that the emphasis on speed made more of an impression than the long-distance title. Even a review from the Mitteilungen des DeutschÖsterreichischen Alpenvereins, representing the perspective of mountain sports enthusiasts who were well aware of different approaches to skiing and mountaineering, describes the sequence as a “wild downhill ski-race” (“ein tolles Abfahrts-Skirennen”).53 In their angular composition, emphasis on speed, and presentation of downhill motion abstracted from broader infrastructures, Fanck’s films introduced aesthetic touches essential to the way the ski industry would subsequently represent itself (figs. 4.1–4.2). Images from ski resorts of the 1930s display aesthetic qualities strikingly similar to 49 Dettling, “Die historische Entwicklung von Skisport und Skitourismus,” 56. 50 Strathausen, “Image as Abyss,” 172. 51 Fanck, Er Führte Regie mit Gletschern, Stürmen und Lawinen, 166. 52 Strathausen, “Image as Abyss,” 172. 53 Dyhrenfurth, “Der heilige Berg,” 208.

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Figure 4.1.  Images from the advertising brochure “Vorarlberg, Österreich,” dated before 1938 (Groß, Wie das 1950er Syndrom in die Täler kam, 136; original document in Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Fremdenverkehr, Schachtel 25).

ski sequences from Fanck’s films. In a 1938 advertising brochure from Vorarlberg, the emphasis on diagonals and the trail of flying snow behind the skiers, combined with the contrasting directional flows between the two images, display an affinity for the angular composition and disjointed editing prominent in Fanck’s ski sequences. It is worth remembering that the embrace of speed was not universal. The ski sequences in Der heilige Berg were filmed in 1925–26 in Lenzerheide,54 a town and ski resort in Graubünden, Switzerland, which had just overturned its ban on cars in 1925. The emphatic focus on speed in Fanck’s films sits in tension against regional trends of resistance against the coming of tourism and mechanized speed. Within this field of tensions, the sublimated engineering 54 Schöning, “Filmographie,” 242.



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Figure 4.2.  Aesthetics of skiing in Der heilige Berg.

gaze seen in Fanck’s film intervenes into an ongoing conflict regarding the triumph of speed in the Alps. Both the brochure and Fanck’s ski sequences concentrate on the speed and power of downhill skiing, while excluding from the image the forces that help to create that speed. While visual artists can create images that focus exclusively on thrilling descents simply through their choice of what to include and exclude within the frame, the physical ski resorts of the Alpine tourism industry could only achieve a similar focus on descent by installing machines to decrease the time and effort involved in the ascent. In interwar Europe, during the same years that Fanck was pioneering the Bergfilm genre, Alpine tourist resorts were developing infrastructure specifically for skiing. Robert Groß describes ski lifts as the basis for structural change of both the economy and the environment starting in the 1930s.55 The change began with a ski vacation that engineer Ernst Constam took to Davos in the late 1920s. Constam applied his training in systems engineering and efficiency monitoring to the practice of skiing and noticed that for every hour of instruction in a ski school, only six minutes were spent descending the slopes.56 He therefore designed a machine 55 Groß, Beschleunigung der Berge, 26. 56 Groß, Beschleunigung der Berge, 92.

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that would take over the work of the slow and physically draining ascent. Constam patented the first tow lift in 1930 and the first lift opened at Davos in 1934. It was a huge success; demand grew quickly after 1935, so that the capacity of the initial lift was increased and new lifts were opened across the Alps and abroad.57 The transformation of the Alpine tourist landscape continued and accelerated, with lifts as only one part of a broad process of landscape modification: “before skiing could become a pillar of the modern Alpine economy, the landscape, too, had to be modernized. To satisfy skiers’ demands for both speed and safety, tourism advocates built lifts, blasted terrain, and managed snow resources.”58 Thus, while Fanck’s images display only a skier in a landscape, they are inextricably linked to the rise of machines in the same environment, for the popularity of downhill skiing was in large part linked to the rise of motorized lifts. In the decades that followed, the lifts would become nearly as invisible on the mountain as they are in Fanck’s films,59 in that they became accepted as infrastructures; they blended into the mountains as unremarkable features that skirted the clear-cut ski slopes—which themselves became an infrastructure that is now an accepted as part of the natural landscape of the Alps. Fanck used the machines of the cinema to create, in filmic space, the same effect that manicured terrain and industrialized networks of lifts would soon enact on the slopes. The sublimated engineer from Renker’s Heilige Berge returns as the systems engineer Ernst Constam to enable the downhill skiing that Fanck has envisioned in Der heilige Berg.

Der große Sprung and the Erasure of Distance One year after Der heilige Berg, another film directed by Arnold Fanck was released. However, Der große Sprung (The Great Leap, dir. Fanck, 1927) does not follow the pathos-laden tragic storylines of Fanck’s prior films; instead, it offers a lighthearted comedy that “skillfully satirizes” some of the traits of Fanck’s own films.60 It features Hans Schneeberger as Michel Treuherz, a wealthy urbanite who comes to the mountains to recover from the stress of his life in the city. While there, he falls in love with a local goatherd, Gita (once again performed by Leni Riefenstahl). Michel’s rival for Gita’s affections is Toni, played by Luis Trenker and described as a local “son of the mountains.” To settle the rivalry between Michel and Toni, Gita declares that a suitor must win the upcoming ski race in order to claim her hand. What follows is a mixture of ski acrobatics and slapstick misadventures. Whereas Toni is already comfortable 57 Groß, Beschleunigung der Berge, 95. 58 Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 168. 59 Cf. Groß, Wie das 1950er Syndrom in die Täler kam, 128. 60 Horak, “Dr. Arnold Fanck,” 35.



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climbing and skiing in the mountainous terrain, Michel has no experience in the mountains. Eventually, through lucky coincidence and the clever intrigues of his loyal servant Paul as much as through the development of his own skills, Michel wins the race and stays in the mountains with Gita rather than returning to the city. As a whole, Der große Sprung offers a remarkable contrast to Fanck’s other films. While his pathos-laden mountain dramas tend to glorify the mountains as a site of mythic struggle and naïve innocence, far removed from the complexities of modern life in the lowlands, this film—through its comic portrayal of both Michel and Toni—pokes fun at these same sentiments, extending urbanites’ stereotypes about the Alps to the point of absurdity just as Ernst Lubitsch had done in his 1919 comedy Meyer aus Berlin (Meyer from Berlin).61 Although the comedic tone in Der große Sprung is very different than that of Fanck’s other films, the treatment of skiing carries out the same transformation of the landscape through aesthetics. As in Der heilige Berg, a pivotal ski race features frantic descents and rhythmic editing. The character of Michel Treuherz adds a new element of technology: Michel and Paul create a series of special-effect innovations such as an inflatable suit that is designed to cushion Michel from falls. In the titular “great leap” near the end of the film, this inflatable suit helps Michel to float through the air and gain extra distance on a jump that carries him past the competition to the finish line. In response to the obvious athleticism of the skiers on screen, combined with playful creative and technological innovations, a review in Das Kino-Journal described the film as being marked by “tempo, excitement, a frenzy of beauty and athletic achievements so unfathomable that one asks oneself where reality ends and special effects begin.”62 Beyond the acceleration and fusion of modernist speed into the Alpine landscape through special effects, elements that had already appeared in Der heilige Berg, the presentation of the Alpine landscape in Der große Sprung offers a new trait: the erasure of distance in order to make remote Alpine sites accessible. Immediately after the film’s opening sequence in which the main characters and setting are introduced, an intertitle introduces a new site of interest: “the Window Towers (Fensterltürme), Gita’s refuge from burdensome suitors.” The progression of shots suggests that these towers are located just outside of the village. Just before the intertitle, Gita has been seen walking through the village with her flock of sheep. At the edge of town, she passes Toni, and once the last of Gita’s goats has passed, Toni follows down the same path. A long shot shows Gita crossing a bridge over a stream ahead of her flock. The final shot before the 61 Horak, “Dr. Arnold Fanck,” 35. 62 M. J., “Der große Sprung,” 13.

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intertitle shows Gita in a flat pasture, at medium distance, looking into the distance behind the camera. The cut to the intertitle, followed by a dissolve to a long shot of the “window towers,” suggests that these spires are what she sees from her streamside pasture in the valley. This impression is confirmed in a cut from the towers back to a close-up of Gita looking into the distance. Toni arrives, and in a brief dialogue, Toni declares that he will come with her to climb the towers. Cut to a shot of Gita running barefoot up a short distance of a grassy slope, and then a shot of Toni at the crest of a small hill—still with grass beneath his boots—and in the next shot, Gita is already walking across a short flat section of rock that leads to two vertical, finger-like stone spires. This sequence suggests that the spires are situated just above the pastures outside the village; they can be reached by means of an easy barefoot scamper up a hill. It is not at all remarkable for film to cut between sites that are distant from each other in order to create a filmic geography in which these sites are suggested to be in close proximity. What is impressive in this scene is the scale at which this erasure of distance takes place. In an extreme long shot when Gita and Toni have reached the towers and Gita has begun climbing, the two stone fingers occupy the lower right quadrant of the screen. The upper left quadrant is dominated by a massive stone arch. Gita can be seen climbing up the center of the arch, with one foot on each side of the arch and an arm reaching to the left for support. The arch and two spires each appear to be about thirty feet tall. The formation’s distinctive appearance would lead one to believe that it should be easily identifiable (fig. 4.3). Yet despite the remarkable appearance of the arch and spires and their location within a well-known region for Alpine tourists and mountaineers, the site is little known and rarely visited. It is referred to as das gespreizte Mandl and is located in the Rosengarten area of the Dolomites. As of May 2023, a Google Image search for “Das gespreizte Mandl, Dolomiten” yields only a handful of images of the formation, and only one displaying a climber or hiker visiting the site in recent years. (The other images include two old postcards, a historic photograph, and a shot of Riefenstahl climbing the formation in Der große Sprung.) In the age of Alpine selfies, this paucity of images is remarkable and underscores the fact that this impressive rock formation lies far afield from the familiar trails of the Dolomites.63 And while filmic 63 The remoteness of the rock formation led to considerable trouble in identifying its location. Initially working alone, I had no success while searching the internet and consulting maps of the area, so I sought the expertise of Kamaal Haque, who has conducted extensive research on mountain films in the Dolomites. We were finally able to identify the location by means of an email chain involving Matthias Fanck, grandson of Dr. Arnold Fanck; Martin Kaufmann, a film expert in South Tyrol; Christian Kaufmann, leader of an Alpine Club section in the Dolomites; and Sergio and Daniele Rosi, mountain guides and owners of



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Figure 4.3.  Remote rock formations rendered accessible in Der große Sprung.

environments cannot be directly equated with the physical geography of the non-filmic world, Fanck himself insists repeatedly, in both his writings and his films, on the authenticity of the mountain landscapes in his films. Der große Sprung is no exception: Immediately after the opening credits, an intertitle declares that “the following athletic achievements in climbing have been filmed exclusively in the Dolomites, the skiing scenes in the famous Arlberg ski region.” While Fanck’s film Dolomites are not the same as the real thing, his insistence on environmental authenticity certainly invites the viewer to consider the non-filmic mountains as a point of reference. Compared to the physical mountains, the mountains on screen feature the same spectacular rocky features, rendered immediately accessible through film editing. The film transforms this remote Alpine setting into an accessible attraction that can be reached in the span of seconds by means of an easy uphill jaunt. Within the filmic environment, it carries out a complementary task to the acceleration seen in the skiing sequences in both Der heilige Berg and Der große Sprung, along with numerous other ski films. Der große Sprung is a useful addition because it does not focus on expert skiers or intrepid mountaineers as its heroes and does not seek to show climbers an Alpine hut near the rock formations in question. Only after receiving photo confirmation from the Rosis were we fully confident that the rock formations had been identified and were still standing at the time of writing.

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venturing off toward distant peaks. Instead, it portrays an idyllic village scene and a weary urbanite protagonist who arrives as a Sommerfrischler, or leisurely summer tourist.64 While Der heilige Berg idealizes the mountaineer and skier, this film features a run-of-the-mill visitor. Such tourists had long been a part of the Alpine tourism industry, and in the years leading up to the film’s release, their numbers had increased tremendously, such that prior infrastructure was no longer sufficient to support them. While the number of Alpine huts increased only 8% between 1913 and 1928, the number of visitors increased 280%.65 By 1927, the German and Austrian Alpine Club had shifted its focus toward protection of the Alpine landscape as a main task rather than expansion of access.66 At the same time, and often in tension against the Alpenverein, local entrepreneurs worked to increase tourist access by continuing to develop transportation infrastructures.67 Through the construction of paths, gondolas, ski areas, and lifts, the Alpine landscape “became an environment engineered for speed, ease of access, and safety,”68 and these changes served the leisure tourist no less than the mountain sports enthusiast. Der große Sprung was released near the peak of the surge in visitors to the Alps. It compresses and delimits the experience of space in similar ways to what would soon occur through the construction of lifts: The “bounded mobility”69 provided by ski lifts was preceded by the bounded visibility provided by film. While much of the mountain remains unseen, Fanck renders one specific remote landscape of arches and spires easily accessible. Andrew Denning has argued that the rise of the sport of skiing exemplified the Italian futurists’ claim that “Time and Space died yesterday” and that traditional notions of space had been replaced by “velocity which is eternal and omnipresent.”70 The ski sequences in Der heilige Berg emphasize velocity and eliminate time; meanwhile, the ease of access in Der große Sprung compresses space. These interventions into the filmic space of the Alps served as a creative vision of environmental transformations that would be realized on the ground through the rapid expansion of lifts in the 1930s.71

64 Holt, “Mountains, Mountaineering and Modernity,” 75. 65 Holt, “Mountains, Mountaineering and Modernity,” 71–72. 66 Peniston-Bird, Rohkrämer, and Schulz, “Glorified, Contested and Mobilized,” 149. 67 Anderson, “Alpine Agency,” 68. 68 Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 156. 69 Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 159. 70 Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 99–100. 71 Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 156.



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Conclusions To some extent, the transformed vision of the environment through erasure of distance, increased access, and an emphasis on speed, seemingly without infrastructure needed to make such speed and access possible, could be seen as a reflection of the inherently dynamic status of filmic space. Laura Frahm describes filmic space as being inherently constructed, moving, and transformative. Filmic spaces are always in flux; movement is a founding element, not something that is done to initially stable images.72 Frahm builds on much older discussions that have asserted movement to be a core element of film from the beginnings of film theory; her key addition is that the movement is unrelated to plot. It renders space dynamic rather than serving to further a human story.73 Frahm’s emphasis on movement and transformation is echoed by Arnold Fanck’s goal, as a director of mountain films, of showing movement in a moving way (Bewegung bewegt wiederzugeben).74 Frahm describes filmic space as a product of filmic topography, the physical sites captured by the camera, and filmic topology, the ways these sites are brought together as a series of visual experiences.75 Fanck draws from a filmic topography that consists of rocky peaks, glaciers, crevasses, idyllic mountain slopes, and valley villages. Meanwhile, his topology sets the mountains into motion: The ski sequences break up the slopes into abstract moments; slower climbing sequences use dissolves and framing to create a dynamic impression. According to Frahm, topological and topographical aspects of film continually overlay each other until they have created a new spatial entity that exists beyond traditional Cartesian understandings. Space becomes “unstable and mutable”; it is “governed by the process of its own visible transformation.”76 Frahm describes this transformative status within urban filmic space, but Fanck’s films demonstrate that Alpine filmic space can be equally dynamic. While film aesthetics help to account for Fanck’s filmic environments, the transformative aesthetics of speed and access in his films were not created from a historical vacuum. Rather, through film, Fanck was able to visually intensify the process of acceleration that was already underway in the physical spaces and textual discourses of the Alps. Der heilige Berg and Der große Sprung envision environmental transformations that cannot yet be realized but that are imaginable as an accelerated trajectory of infrastructure projects that were already underway. The infrastructures are only implied, not seen. Paul Edwards writes that “infrastructures 72 Frahm, Jenseits des Raums, 15. 73 Frahm, Jenseits des Raums, 146. 74 Horak, “Dr. Arnold Fanck,” 23. 75 Frahm, Jenseits des Raums, 189–90. 76 Frahm, Jenseits des Raums, 190.

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function for us, both conceptually and practically, as environment, as social setting, and as the invisible, unremarked basis of modernity itself.”77 Infrastructures are generally invisible, Edwards suggests, and in Fanck’s films the infrastructures of industrialized ski tourism remain unseen—yet the accelerated motion and immediate access that they facilitate implies their existence. By giving viewers a filmic experience of downhill skiing, erasing the distance to remote peaks, and thus creating an aesthetic proxy for the infrastructures needed to support such speed and access outside the movie theater, Der heilige Berg and Der große Sprung demonstrate the catalyzing power of film within the socio-ecological interactions between cultural representations and physical landscapes. These films do not only describe the speed of skiing, as could be done in a poster or written advertisement. They let viewers experience speed and move through remote spaces. In addition, with UFA as the studio behind Der heilige Berg and Der große Sprung, the films marketed this experience to millions of moviegoers, while also dramatically raising the profile of the Bergfilm genre so that the impacts of these films would be multiplied by successive films in the years that followed. Within the history of Alpine tourism and infrastructure development—in which pre-filmic media had long contributed to conflicts over land use—these mountain films not only contributed to, but also catalyzed, changes in the land. The mountains thus comprised a dynamic site within the material history of German film, no less than the industrial and urban sites where modern environmental transformations would be expected. As both record and catalyst, mountain films serve as an ecological archive for a changing landscape. As the next chapter explores, in urban settings as well, the filmic curation of environments reveals unexpected interplay between human creativity, nonhuman agency, and the reciprocal influence of environments on and off screen.

77 Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity,” 186.

5: Greenwashing in Black and White: Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, Die Stadt der Millionen, Menschen am Sonntag 4 million people waiting . . .1 Marx noted that capitalism is in the first instance a question of managing time, of “the annihilation of space by time” . . .2

O

of film history centers around the arrival of a train. As an excited audience watches the beginning of a film, a long passenger train glides from the right-hand edge into the middle of the frame toward the camera. The legend, of course, is that when this short film was first seen in 1895, viewers were terrified and ran away from the screen as if a real train were barreling down upon them. They did not need to wait for the train—it was already moving, and their response, according to the legend, was to get out of the way. Building on this long-standing sense of connection between the physicality of railroad infrastructure and the creative medium of film, the present chapter examines semi-documentary films from Weimarera Berlin. Transport infrastructure features prominently in these films. Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of the Metropolis, 1927), begins with a long prelude showing a train ride into the city and features scenes of street traffic throughout the film. The first feature-length Berlin film, Adolf Trotz’s Die Stadt der Millionen (City of Millions) from 1925, ends with an animated image of numerous train lines descending on a picture of the bear that serves as the city’s symbol. Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930) shows an allday excursion by regional rail to a lake on the edge of the city; it also emphasizes diverse other types of urban mobility throughout the film. In all of these cases, transport infrastructures seem to stand in for the mobility, interconnectivity, and complexity intrinsic to the urban setting. The repeated focus on transportation technologies reveals an awareness of the ne of the great legends

1 2

Quoted from the final intertitles of the film Menschen am Sonntag. Väliaho, “Marxism and the Movies,” 15.

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underlying infrastructures that make the flurry of urban activity possible and a desire to render those infrastructures visible through film. As elsewhere in this book, my use of the term “infrastructure” in this context is intentionally broad. Matthew Gandy notes that the word originally referred to railroad systems, but has “gradually acquired a wider set of meanings and applications, and has proved surprisingly malleable in relation to the development of different types of technical and organizational networks.”3 Paul Edwards’s metaphorical description of infrastructures as the “connective tissues and circulatory systems of modernity” is particularly apt for the urban films discussed below, in that the transport infrastructures shown on screen carry the Berlin residents across the diverse parts of the city, allowing people to circulate freely and disparate locations to become connected. While doing this work of linking between people, places, and non-human matter, infrastructures remain generally unseen. Film renders them visible, multiplies their powers to transform environments and accelerate motions and processes through the inherently dynamic cinematic medium, and then itself becomes a circulating commodity within the urban system. It is both an archive of the city’s images and motions, and also a tradeable good and cultural influence within the urban ecological system thus archived. For the most part, the key adjectives in the paragraphs above—connective, circulatory, and dynamic—align with the films to be discussed. But at the end of Menschen am Sonntag, something strange happens. After a day of lakeside leisure at the edge of the city, the film’s protagonists have returned to the center of Berlin, and the final shots show them, alongside hundreds of other Berliners captured in documentary footage, returning to work. Traffic of all kinds is shown: people walk, run, ride bicycles, wait for public transit, drive carts pulled by horses, ride motorcycles—and in some shots, nearly all of these forms of mobility are seen at once. This final sequence, featuring traffic shots interspersed with final intertitles that state that it is now Monday and everybody is back at work, shows a sense of constant motion as frenetic as any scene in the film. And yet, the intertitles conclude with the sentence: “4 million people wait for the next Sunday.” The verb used to describe so much frenetic activity is warten: to wait. How, why, and with what consequences does the film describe its most accelerated scene with a verb implying stasis? To work through this contradiction, the following pages will explore how urban films from the Weimar era are embedded within Berlin’s environmental and political history in order to understand their role as part of the ecological archive of German cinema. Weimar cinema gave rise to some of film history’s most memorable urban films. These films reflect the mix of fascination and fear at the wild flurry of human activity that 3 Gandy, The Fabric of Space, 2.

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marked many discussions of the metropolis in early twentieth-century Germany.4 Moreover, the cinema formed a significant part of the entertainment that city-dwellers could enjoy, once they had waited through the six days of their frantic work weeks. Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, Die Stadt der Millionen, and Menschen am Sonntag, each in their own ways, emphasize aspects of urban mobility and magnify it through the filmic medium. The past two chapters have discussed how Fritz Lang’s Metropolis reflects recent infrastructure developments despite the supposedly futuristic setting and how Weimar-era mountain films archived and accelerated tourist development in the Alps. This chapter takes a related approach by interpreting urban films within the context of, and examining their impacts on, the rapidly expanding infrastructures of Berlin in the Weimar era.

The City and Weimar Cinema Berlin, the center of the German film industry, grew tremendously during the first years after the creation of the modern German state in 1871. Key areas of expansion included the city’s population, geographic size, and the size and complexity of its administrative systems and infrastructures.5 As Brian Ladd notes, Berlin’s urban expansion developed through a complex process impacted by economic and political goals from the sides of both labor and capital, and from diverse political viewpoints. The city’s growth “was fueled by a powerful accumulation of industrial capital which demanded external support from the facilities that today are subsumed under the name ‘infrastructure.’”6 Business interests demanded public investment in urban spaces and technologies that would support a healthy and efficient work force. At the same time, as will be discussed below, various political parties sought divergent goals and urban planning models with regards to parks, transport networks, and residential neighborhoods. Processes and plans for urban development were contested; the city grew rapidly, but not smoothly. With so much new urban development in Berlin during the same years that the new German film industry was established and concentrated there, it is not surprising that the primary setting for Weimar film

4 Kaes, “Film in der Weimarer Republik,” 61. 5 The city’s population grew rapidly after the formation of the German state in 1871. In terms of geography and administrative expansion, the annexation of areas around Berlin to create a large and very complex administrative and governmental structure did not take place until 1920. See Köhler, “Berlin in der Weimarer Republik,” 815. 6 Ladd, Urban Planning, 3.

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was the city.7 Most of Weimar cinema’s filmic cities were shot indoors and in studio spaces, from the stylized sets of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920) to the massive urban street scenes constructed for films like F. W. Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) and the innovative visual effects of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). However, like the other landscapes discussed in prior chapters—the rural Heimat scenes explored in chapter 1, the contrasts between rural and industrial landscapes discussed in chapter 2, or the mountain films analyzed in chapter 4—Weimar-era city films also include a number of semi-documentary films created outdoors and on location, usually in Berlin. Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin is the prime example, but certainly not the only one. The present discussion of Berlin films builds on the work of past studies that have examined how the metropolis and the cinematic medium arose together as modern phenomena, probing the ways in which the film industry has helped to shape urban space as well as how urban space has become a prominent cinematic locus.8 In the last two decades in particular, scholars have carried out sophisticated analyses of the spatial dynamics that arise when a three-dimensional urban landscape is represented in two-dimensional cinematic images, building on the insights of the spatial turn in the humanities.9 Throughout these texts, a common thread is the shared dynamic status of urban space and the city: unlike the more stable and relaxed countryside, the city appears to have the default status of being in motion and undergoing constant change, making it an environment well-suited to the art of the moving image.10 The genre known as the city symphony occupies an important position in this discussion. These films constitute a genre based on the dynamic rhythms, constant movement, and formal patterns that mark the physical and human elements of the metropolis. The city symphony genre is especially important for studies of 7 It is worth noting that urban growth in Germany was not evenly distributed, but rather was focused in the capital: Berlin’s “sheer size presented problems that other cities did not have to face—problems of transit and administrative coordination, for example.” Ladd, Urban Planning, 132. 8 See, for example, Clarke, ed., The Cinematic City; Frahm, Jenseits des Raums; Majchrzak, Von Metropolis bis Manhattan; Shiel and Fitzmaurice, eds., Cinema and the City; and Shiel and Fitzmaurice, Screening the City. For studies of the urban environment specifically within German film, see Möbius and Vogt, Drehort Stadt; Schenk, ed., Dschungel Großstadt; and Vogt, Die Stadt im Kino. 9 Shiel and Fitzmaurice, Screening the City, 1; Frahm, Jenseits des Raums, 40–42. 10 For discussion of the shared dynamic status of cinema and the city, see Frahm, Jenseits des Raums, 10. The relationship between cinema and the speed of modern transportation, especially the railroad, becomes important in modernity studies; see Kirby, Parallel Tracks and Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey.

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Weimar cinema, since Ruttmann’s Berlin is widely recognized as an exemplar (or even the prototype) of the genre.11 But Ruttmann’s film was not the first urban semi-documentary; it had important predecessors, including the feature-length Stadt der Millionen released two years earlier, and it was followed by other films that curate visual material of the urban environment to different effect. While city planners in Berlin were developing greenspaces in the center and protecting idyllic environs at the periphery, film provided a visual infrastructure that connected these spaces in contrasting configurations. Using the shared visual infrastructure of film, but pursuing diverse aesthetic goals or political agendas, the films discussed below document and engage with the environmental transformations already underway in the metropolis.

Ruttmann’s Berlin: Infrastructure, Editing, and the Mutable City Ruttmann’s Berlin creates a feature-length film out of documentary footage from Weimar-era Berlin in an aesthetically innovative style, and as a result, it has become a classic of German cinema.12 The film’s legacy is somewhat incongruous with its origin: it was made as a Kontingentfilm or quota film for Fox-Europe, essentially a byproduct of an infrastructural layer that goes unseen within the film (despite its insistent focus on urban infrastructures), namely the international financing, production, and distribution networks of the film industry. American studios were required to produce these quota films within Germany in order to be allowed to import their own titles. The resulting movies were usually cheaply and quickly made and unremarkable; Ruttmann’s Berlin, however, became one of the groundbreaking films of Weimar cinema. It shows a day in the life of the city from 1926, starting with a prelude that involves a train ride into the city from the surrounding countryside, followed by a series of dissolves between long shots showing the city’s rooftops from the 11 On Ruttmann’s Berlin as prototype for the city symphony genre, see MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine, 151–52. Other key films of the genre include Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta (New York, 1921), Antonio Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (Paris, 1926) and Dzigo Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Moscow, 1929). For an introduction to the city symphony genre, see Hake, Topographies of Class, 259; for a more detailed analysis, see Frahm, Jenseits des Raums, 232–56, and Jacobs et al., eds., The City Symphony Phenomenon. 12 For concise guides to the extensive scholarly literature on Ruttmann’s Berlin; see Hake, Topographies of Class, 309–10; and Peabody, Environmental Fantasies, 143–46. Two sourcebooks provide crucial starting points for research on Ruttmann’s film: see Georgen, Walter Ruttmann and Quaresima, ed., Walter Ruttmann.

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air, a series of building facades, and finally, eye-level shots of city streets. The film then progresses through the course of a day: it starts with the quiet and empty streets in the early morning, then shows the morning commute and the opening of businesses, building momentum to an initial climax marked by the frantic activity of the morning work shift. A lunch respite follows, showing humans of all social classes as well as dogs, horses, and zoo animals taking their midday meal. After this pause, an afternoon work session accelerates toward a second climax that juxtaposes a ride on a roller coaster, a series of newspapers scrolling down the screen with individual words such as “murder” and “money” popping out in bold print, and, finally, a woman jumping off a bridge to commit suicide. After the workday ends, the film’s final act cuts between various leisure and recreation activities, followed by a fast-paced finale portraying the city’s nightlife. Throughout, the film relies almost entirely on documentary footage of people in the city—largely unaware that they are being filmed—and cuts these images together to emphasize formal patterns and rhythms.13 From the outset, Ruttmann’s film focuses on infrastructure. The prologue features not only the train speeding toward the city, but also power lines and canals that support the work of the city. After arrival, the shots descend from aerial views all the way down into the impressive sewer tunnels beneath the surface of the city. As discussed in chapter 3, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis—released the same year—focuses on water infrastructure as a site of fascination and fear; the portrayal in Ruttmann’s film appears more objective, using infrastructural systems at various levels of the city as isolated images and spaces to be joined in a play of formal cinematic montage. Numerous infrastructural aspects of the city are set into motion, so that the camera not only speeds along on the train, but also looks at the train from outside and intercuts various parts of the engine, train cars, tracks, bridges, and power lines beside the tracks: the film shows the motion enabled by transport infrastructure and multiplies this mobility through editing. The film creates an impression of perpetual motion using not only expected images of trains, planes, and automobiles, but also via images more commonly associated with rural Heimat or mountain films:14 the film’s final scenes contain shots of skiing and sledding. Ruttmann was not 13 Siegfried Kracauer’s influential critique of Ruttmann’s Berlin argues that the film emphasizes purely formal patterns at the expense of social contexts and causes. See Kracauer, “Wir schaffens”; and Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 182–88. 14 Anton Kaes explicitly discusses the notion of Heimat in relation to Ruttmann’s film, although he does not focus on the skiing and sledding scenes. Kaes argues that entertainment locales shown in the final scene provide a substitute Heimat for new city-dwellers who have left their homes. Kaes, “Leaving Home.”

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the first film artist to make the connection between urban infrastructures and mountain sports. László Moholy-Nagy’s manuscript Dynamik der Gross-Stadt (Dynamic of the Metropolis), in an edition published in the mid-1920s, includes images from Wunder des Schneeschuhs (Wonders of Skiing), an instructional ski book by Hannes Schneider and Arnold Fanck.15 Moreover, the ski sequences in Fanck’s films employ modernist editing techniques similar to traffic montages in Ruttmann’s Berlin, as discussed in the prior chapter.16 Fanck himself was aware of the similarity between his and Ruttmann’s film styles and therefore hired Ruttmann as an additional editor to help with Das weiße Stadion (The White Stadium), his film about the 1928 winter Olympics.17 With all of these urban-Alpine links in mind, it becomes less of a surprise when, near the end of Berlin, several shots of snowshoeing and ski jumping are inserted into the middle of the scenes of Berlin nightlife. The snowshoeing comes first, as a line of women march in step on snowshoes, suggesting a curious fusion of a group hike and a dance revue. Like the women seen dancing on a nightclub stage two minutes earlier, the snowshoers are shown in close-ups that emphasize the synchronized motion of individual body parts. They appear as rationalized, machine-like objects rather than human beings.18 As the choreographed snowshoers approach the camera, a wall is dimly visible in the background. At first glance, it is not entirely clear what type of wall it is—perhaps the facades of buildings at the edge of a park being used for the snow sequences, or perhaps a wall marking the edge of an interior space. The following shot provides the answer. While still not in focus, a high roof can be seen overhead, with lights shining down on the snow. The ski and snowshoe sequences are part of an indoor entertainment event, reminding the viewer of a new development in the urban space of Weimar-era Berlin: The world’s first indoor ski slope was created in Berlin’s Sportpalast (sports palace) in 1927, providing a realworld corollary to the many “outdoor” scenes in films of the day that were actually shot indoors.19 In the scenes that follow, the film shows 15 Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Fotografie, Film, 134. The film manuscript, Dynamik der Gross-Stadt, was published in this volume on modern visual art, which was released in 1925 as part of the series Bauhausbücher (Bauhaus Books). 16 For discussion of the modernist and abstract elements of Fanck’s ski sequences, see Brandlmeier, “Sinngezeichen,” 80, as well as the analysis and literature review in the prior chapter of the present book. 17 Fanck, Er führte Regie, 193. 18 For a classic analysis of this phenomenon, see Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament.” 19 Allen, Historical Dictionary of Skiing, xxvii. Additionally, Bernhard Tschofen quotes a review from the Frankfurter Zeitung that describes—with an appropriate dose of irony—a 1927 winter festival set up inside an exhibition hall

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Figure 5.1.  Indoor skiing in Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt.

shots of boxing, ice skating, and bicycle racing—all of which took place within the indoor space of the Berliner Sportpalast during the year when Ruttmann and his team were gathering footage for their film. Ruttmann’s Berlin shows the spatial transformations that take place within a single urban location. To render these changes visible, it provides the visual means to see the same site as it appears at different times. The sequence featuring the Sportpalast shows how city space itself, down to the level of individual buildings, has become mutable and dynamic. Film accelerates and concentrates the changes inherent to city space. While cities are necessarily built landscapes and thus spaces within which the idea of the Anthropocene might seem to add little that is new, film allows these landscapes to be seen in new ways. Within the seemingly natural landscapes of the mountain or Heimat genres, film imagines an Anthropo(s)cene with new creative potential. In the city, that creative potential has already arrived, but is spread out across the space and time of the metropolis. Film allows it to be seen in one place within a span of minutes. Cinema therefore serves as the archive within which the dynamic space of the city can be viewed in full. in Berlin, featuring an indoor sledding and skiing hill alongside a snack bar, live music, and yodeling revelers. See Tschofen, “Schnee-Kulturen,” 39.

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Stadt der Millionen: The Finished City As the prototypical city symphony, Ruttmann’s Berlin famously emphasizes the speed and dynamic rhythms of the city. The familiarity of Ruttmann’s film and others like it, especially Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, have made this aesthetic and thematic focus take on the status of the assumed default for 1920s urban films. However, a related but littleknown film from just two years before Ruttmann’s Berlin takes a very different approach. Adolf Trotz’s Die Stadt der Millionen uses many of the same sites as Ruttmann’s film, but rather than emphasizing the city’s permanent status of flux, it uses the unifying structure of film to bring all of these elements into a coherent whole.20 Trotz’s Stadt der Millionen, released in 1925, was the first featurelength documentary to provide a filmic portrait of Berlin. The film presents the city through a tourist gaze,21 focusing on famous landmarks and reenacting scenes involving well-known political or literary figures from the city’s past.22 The film begins with a view of Berlin from an airplane; the frame then descends to ground level and shows various Berlin sites from a tour bus. While Ruttmann’s film cuts between sites to emphasize patterns of rhythm, shape, and movement, Trotz shows these sites from a specific standpoint within the city. To emphasize that the filmic gaze is firmly situated in the perspective of a tourist on the street, the final scene returns to the sky, with the camera looking up from within a crowd gathered around the Siegessäule (Victory Column), watching a massive zeppelin floating overhead. Although a number of shots focus on city traffic and intertitles draw the viewer’s attention to the “hot spots (Brennpunkten) of traffic,” the editing—which acts as the primary source of dynamic energy in Ruttmann’s film—is relatively static in Trotz’s documentary. Guido Altendorf points out that the film was made before Soviet montage had arrived in Germany. As a result, the rhythmic montage style that Ruttmann employs in 1927 is absent in this film from just two years earlier23 and 20 In providing a unified vision of Berlin, Trotz’s film fits into the Städtefilm (city film) rather than the city symphony genre. The Städtefilm was a type of documentary short (Kulturfilm) that served as advertising for specific cities. See Georgen, “Urbanität und Idylle,” 167–70. 21 See Urry, The Tourist Gaze. 22 Jesko Jockenhövel contrasts this emphasis on individual sites and people with Ruttmann’s focus on the general (“das Allgemeingültige”). Jockenhövel, “Von Fichte bis zum Alten Fritz.” 23 Guido Altendorf points out that, although the editing lacks the complexity of later montage practices, the special effects of Die Stadt der Millionen nonetheless provide an impressive array of the cinematic tricks available at the time, including multiple exposures, split screens, slow-motion or accelerated shots, and

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the Berlin that is shown in 1925, stripped of the filmic manipulations of Ruttmann’s film, is surprisingly tame and sedate. Contrary to Karl Scheffler’s famous quote from 1910 that Berlin is condemned “continually to become and never to be,”24 the city in Trotz’s film is remarkably intact, with very few construction sites appearing on screen. Mario Geßler asserts that this is a fact of the city itself in 1925, not mere omission by the filmmaker: the rapid growth of the capital during the Gründerzeit had passed, and the next stages of massive construction (and destruction) would not take place until the Nazi era.25 Even though the 1920s did not see the frenzy of new building construction that had been seen following 1871, the stretching of Berlin’s administrative borders and growth of its population still required an impressive increase in infrastructure and social support systems. Parks figured prominently in these developments, and the results are seen in Trotz’s film, for example in the numerous shots of nature around Berlin. The city’s mayor Gustav Böß is celebrated in the film’s intertitles as a tireless promoter of young people’s health, and his tenure as mayor from 1921 to 1929 coincided with the major development of parks, recreation sites, and sports facilities,26 building on initiatives that had been underway since the turn of the twentieth century. Berlin planners and policymakers carried out the work of “urban greening” starting in the late 1800s, when parks were seen as a necessary remedy to compensate for urban problems such as overcrowding, lack of fresh air, and lack of access to spaces for recreation.27 These same themes were emphasized in cities around Europe, but the problems at stake were especially acute in Berlin, given the city’s rapid growth from just 415,000 residents in the mid-1800s, to almost four million in 1920, after the administrative infrastructure of the Kaiserreich had drawn numerous migrants to the city and a process of administrative expansion had added surrounding areas to the city’s jurisdiction.28 Prior to this era, Berlin’s parks had been developed from earlier forests or parklands belonging to the Prussian court, such as the Tiergarten, and were developed as aesthetically pleasing landscape gardens, providing a “tamed nature” that “mimicked the pastoral scenery of the

animated sequences juxtaposed with live-action sequences. See Altendorf, “Die Stadt Der Millionen.” 24 Scheffler, Berlin, 267. 25 Geßler, “Die Stadt der Millionen,” 15. 26 Geßler, “Die Stadt der Millionen,” 19. 27 Lachmund, Greening Berlin, 19. 28 Lachmund, Greening Berlin, 21. For details on Berlin’s administrative expansion through the Groß-Berlin-Gesetz (Greater Berlin Act) in 1920, see Köhler, “Berlin in der Weimarer Republik,” 814–24.

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countryside.”29 But in the first decades of the twentieth century, in what might be seen as a form of nature-based biopolitics, Berlin’s park development shifted to focus on simultaneous benefits to the city’s beauty as well as to the physical health and perceived morality of its citizens. A new school of thought regarding urban parks turned away from thinking of them as aesthetic objects or “air-refreshing lungs” that would cleanse the city’s air, and instead focused on improving city residents’ health and quality of life through parks designed for recreation.30 The Volkspark, or people’s park, emerged from this new line of thinking as a site designed especially for the working class and provided amenities such as walking paths, facilities for sports, swimming pools, and areas for children to play, with aesthetics being only a secondary concern. At the same time that parks were being developed within the city limits, planners and architects influenced by the garden city movement pushed for a network of towns and undeveloped countryside spaces that would connect the benefits of the countryside with the resources of the city.31 Die Stadt der Millionion highlights this process: in its fictionalized tour through the spaces of Berlin, the film introduces parks on the outskirts of Berlin “in all directions of the compass rose.” Images are shown of walkers and boaters enjoying the woodland trails and lakes located on Berlin’s periphery. Scenes are shown in winter as well as summer, and the sites are listed in intertitles together with their direction from the city center. The Wannsee lake is described in intertitles as an Ostseeersatz (replacement Baltic Sea). The film reflects urban planners’ goal of giving all city residents access to garden spaces: by suggesting that the green­spaces extend in all directions, showing multiple types of activities in various seasons, and showing the crowded beach of the Wannsee (although not nearly as crowded as it became by the end of the decade, as seen in the shots from Menschen am Sonntag five years later), the film projects an image in which the city residents have easy and affordable access to nature. As Stadt der Millionen shows, many plans for the greening of Berlin became reality, and politicians such as Böß were credited with developing successful parks systems among numerous other social programs in the rapidly growing capital. Throughout the 1920s, the SPD (German 29 Lachmund, Greening Berlin, 23. For details on political struggles over the plans and costs for new parks in imperial Berlin, see Ladd, Urban Planning, 70–73. 30 Lachmund, Greening Berlin, 23; see also Ladd, Urban Planning, 73. 31 For discussion of the garden city movement’s impact in Germany, see Ladd, Urban Planning, 231; Lachmund, Greening Berlin, 23; and Gandy, The Fabric of Space, 62. For a contemporary voice arguing for implementation of garden city principles in Weimar-era urban planning, see N., “A Contemporary Garden City.”

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Social Democratic Party) controlled Berlin politics and pushed for parks designed for recreation in order to serve workers’ needs. Seven new greenspaces were planned by the Berlin government in 1922 alone. In 1926, Martin Wagner was appointed as the Baudirektor (director of construction) by the Berlin senate, giving him power to further promote his goals for parks as recreational resources. These developments, among others, led to the status of the 1920s as “pivotal for the formation and consolidation of a green planning regime in Berlin.”32 This sense of nature in the city forms an important backdrop for the Berlin films of the Weimar era. But parks, at least according to the new recreation-minded approach, were only useful if people could access them. The sense of a green Berlin relied on transport links to carry workers between their homes, workplaces, and recreation sites. In Die Stadt der Millionen, the film’s closing special effect draws attention to the increased rail infrastructure created to meet these needs. In the final shot, a collage features seven train tracks converging in the middle of the frame, with the bear that symbolizes Berlin at the point where the tracks meet. This conclusion implies that all (rail)roads now lead to Berlin; in consequence, the city is seamlessly connected to nonurban spaces. The film seems to carry out the final step in the goal of Berlin urban planners from the 1920s to connect urban spaces, parks, and the surrounding countryside as a pleasantly unified whole. While the narration of the film enacts a tourist gaze, the resulting view of the city follows a specific political vision for its inhabitants, echoing the SPD-led project of creating a park-filled city, with ample connections to nature, that will keep its workers happy. The film ends with an image of infrastructure that itself looks like a plant with branching leaves, suggesting the city as an organic whole, with infrastructure as the skeleton, circulatory system, and connective tissue of the urban body. As a groundbreaking text within the ecological archive of German cinema, it displays critical points of the physical world that had already been transformed, and curates them in a shape that emphasizes the filmmakers’ and city planners’ visions for an urban space stitched together from seemingly natural and industrialized spaces, displaying an Anthropo(s)cene vision of mutual embeddedness between humans and nature. As discussed above, Ruttmann’s Berlin, made just two years later, showed the dynamic motion in the city and the transformations that could take place within a single urban space. The final film discussed in this chapter seems to be focused on something quite different. Menschen am Sonntag once again features the connected urban and natural sites, as in Trotz’s film, but by focusing on the leisure experienced by workers who make use of the city’s 32 Lachmund, Greening Berlin, 26; see also Gandy, The Fabric of Space, 59–60.

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Figure 5.2.  Transport infrastructure as the connective tissue of the city. From Die Stadt der Millionen.

connected spaces (rather than tourists vising the city only to leave again), the parklands seen in Die Stadt der Millionen take on a clearer social and environmental function within the whole of Berlin’s urban space.

Film Without Industry: Menschen am Sonntag Like Ruttmann’s Berlin, the 1930 film Menschen am Sonntag was a surprise success. However, its origin diverges in significant ways from that of Ruttmann’s film. Although Berlin was made as a cheap local film to satisfy an international agreement regarding imported American films, it was made by prominent and well-established figures within the German film industry; regardless of its avant-garde artistic status, the film arose as a product of the film establishment.33 Menschen am Sonntag, on the other hand, was made by a set of people whose names would become 33 Michael Cowan argues that Ruttmann and other Weimar-era artists were in fact not opposed to business interests, but instead saw their artistic talents as a form of expertise that could be put to various productive uses from product advertisements to political propaganda. Cowan suggests that this helps account for Ruttmann’s easy integration into Nazi film production. See Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 25–28.

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associated with prolific Hollywood careers, but who were virtually unknown at the time.34 Menschen am Sonntag features a plot that contains little more action than what is already evident in the title. The film shows a group of five young Berliners on a typical Sunday engaging in leisure activities of various sorts on their one day off from work. The film opens on a Saturday afternoon. We see the five main characters finishing their workdays and planning their excursion for the following day. Wolfgang, a traveling wine salesman, approaches Christl, a film extra, when he notices that she is standing alone in front of Berlin-Zoo train station, apparently having been stood up by somebody she was going to meet. The two settle into a café together, and he invites her to join the excursion to a nearby lake the next day. We then see Erwin, the taxi driver, arrive home after work. While getting ready to go out for the evening, he and his girlfriend Annie get into a fight, at which point Wolfgang, Erwin’s friend, invites himself over, and the two men play cards while Annie sulks. All are planning to join the next day’s excursion. But the next morning, Annie does not get out of bed. She sleeps literally all day; meanwhile, Erwin, Wolfgang, Christl, and Christl’s friend Brigitte all meet at the Nikolassee station. The four of them spend the day swimming, picnicking, strolling in the woods, flirting, and paddle-boating.35 At day’s end, they return to the city and part ways, and Erwin arrives home to find Annie still in bed. In the final sequence of the film, we see a montage of crowd scenes and the individual characters from the rest of the film, all moving quickly in their workday routine. The final intertitles appear, one word or phrase at a time: “4—million—people—wait—for the next—Sunday.” While Ruttmann’s film is all about the tempo of an urban workday, this film shows a weekend city that is permeated with the leisure represented by the peripheral countryside. The origin of the film (or at least one version of the story of its origin) also matches this portrayal of 34 The exception is the film’s cameraman, Eugen Schüfftan, who designed the so-called “Schüfftan process” that used mirrors and miniature models to create an illusion of monumental sets, most famously in Metropolis. On Menschen am Sonntag, useful background information can be found in Vogt, Die Stadt im Kino, 224–37; Koepnick, “The Bearable Lightness of Being,” 237–53; and Dumont, “Robert Siodmaks avantgardistische Filme,” 142–51. 35 The description provided here, like most synopses of the film, suggests that the excursion provides a pleasant day of mental and physical liberation from economically determined roles. While the present study is focused on environmental concerns resulting from this socio-economic scenario, it is worth noting that the film’s gender norms also merit critique: a recent study has argued that the film is structured around scenes of pursuit that reflect an unquestioned rape culture in Weimar-era Berlin. See Collenberg-Gonzalez, “Rape Culture and Dialectical Montage.”

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utopian leisure space within the city. While the interviews from brothers Robert and Curt Siodmak, Billie Wilder, Edgar Ulmer, and Fred Zinnemann differ as to the role of each person in the conception and making of the film, a charming anecdote holds that the idea grew out of a gathering of the young filmmakers at the Romanisches Café in Berlin. The project was made possible by a sum of a few thousand marks (even then an extremely small amount for a film) given to Robert Siodmak.36 The conflicting accounts and likelihood of each have been analyzed elsewhere;37 for my purposes, it is intriguing to note that the film reportedly arose from precisely the sort of situation shown within the film: an act of spontaneity and leisure, born out of individual interest and desire. The story of the film’s conception depicts a utopian moment of productive, self-directed leisure that stands in contrast to both the depiction of the city as well as the inception as a result of international trade agreements of Ruttmann’s Berlin.38 Menschen am Sonntag depicts a day of leisure in idyllic lakeside and woodland settings, but it emerges from several decades of remarkably eventful environmental and infrastructural history. Beyond the political contexts and park expansions mentioned above, the specific location for the film played an important role in Weimar-era efforts at building citynature connections. In 1930, the year Menschen am Sonntag was released and showed bathers frolicking in Berlin’s Wannsee, that lake boasted the largest inland bathing beach in Europe. The lake had become easily accessible with the opening of the “Wannseebahn” train line between Berlin and Potsdam in 1891, although swimming there had not become legal until 1907.39 This rail expansion was part of a broader trend: in Berlin and elsewhere, “suburban rail lines were promoted with reference to the decentralized and healthy living conditions they would foster”; supporters pointed to the moral as well as physical benefits that workers would gain through escape from the crowded city.40 In the specific example of Wannsee, the lake provided a bathing spot for hundreds of thousands of Berliners annually, drawing huge weekend crowds of workers. The popularity of the site rose most spectacularly during the late 1920s: between 1926 and 1930, the number of annual visitors increased from 750,000 36 Billy Wilder’s own account confirms this narrative; see Chandler, Billy Wilder, 47. 37 See Vogt, Die Stadt im Kino, 226–28 for an overview of conflicting statements from the various filmmakers involved. 38 For a discussion of the film’s utopian origins as a collective project, as well as insights regarding the film’s allure due to its use of novice actors, its status as a silent film in the newly begun age of sound, and border-crossings between narrative and documentary film styles, see Bellour, Les hommes, le dimanche. 39 Oloew, 100 Jahre Strandbad Wannsee, 15. 40 Ladd, Urban Planning, 209.

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to 1.3 million.41 To move people between their homes in the city and parks on the periphery, Berlin’s transportation network had been expanding and modernizing rapidly during the 1920s. The train line to Wannsee had been electrified in 1928. In that same year, the Berliner VekehrsAktiengesellschaft or BVG was formed. Through this organization, the conglomeration of Berlin transportation networks became the largest communally owned corporation in the world and the third-largest corporation of any kind in Germany.42 Given that the train line to Nikolassee had just been expanded and electrified, and that the BVG had just been formed as an immense public transit system, films that cut between the city and the lake are in fact zooming in selectively on the center and the periphery of a rapidly growing urban transportation network. The sense of calm leisure within the lake scenes of Menschen am Sonntag (as one example), and the resulting way in which the city seems to take on traits of the countryside, is predicated on the frantic pace of urban infrastructure expansion that preceded the film’s production. Matthew Gandy discusses Menschen am Sonntag as a document of Berlin’s development of water resources and infrastructures to promote recreation in the 1920s. Certainly, the film shows the impact that the development of parks as recreational sites had on the workers who lived in the new German capital, and especially the projects for bathing facilities and lakeside woodland protection that Martin Wagner had pushed for after taking over as the city building director of Berlin four years earlier.43 Beyond simply showing the impressive park facilities of late-Weimarera Berlin, Menschen am Sonntag uses the filmic medium to manipulate time and space so as to multiply the effects that urban planners sought to achieve through the landscapes shown in the film. In his essay about the film, Lutz Koepnick suggests that “the city is secretly present in nearly every shot of the film.”44 Although most of the plot takes place in the idyllic countryside around the Wannsee, the five main characters establish the film’s urban status from the moment of their introduction. Laura Frahm notes that each of the five protagonists carries out a typically modern line of work within the commerce and transportation systems, key industries that mark the rise of urban modernity.45 Additionally, the film attempts to enhance its sense of authenticity by stating, in intertitles, that 41 Büchi, Als die Moral baden ging, 122–23. 42 Köhler, “Berlin in der Weimarer Republik,” 859. 43 Gandy, The Fabric of Space, 65–66. For additional discussion of Martin Wagner’s role in Berlin parks, as well as the role of the SPD party that held a firm grip on Berlin politics in this period, see Lachmund, Greening Berlin, 25. 44 Koepnick, “The Bearable Lightness of Being,” 251. 45 Frahm, Jenseits des Raums, 232.

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the five actors are performing in a movie for the first time. In interviews after the film’s release, the filmmakers maintained this notion of authentic representation: the actors in fact played themselves on screen; after shooting the film, they returned to the jobs described within the film.46 Through this repeated emphasis on the real-life status of the characters, the profilmic city and the filmic city are folded into each other, appearing to overlap around the edges, just as the countryside and city overlap within the film. Frahm argues that the topology of People on Sunday is built on a rhythm of departure from and return to the city, and the resulting structure is one of deceleration and acceleration.47 The film certainly revolves around this relationship between the leisure space at Wannsee and the urban working space of Berlin. But it is not an equal relationship. The accelerated world of Berlin exists only as a frame. The film presents a manipulation of time no less extreme than Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, but in the opposite direction. While Ruttmann’s Berlin creates a sense of the perpetual motion and accumulation of rational, organized events that comprise the big city, Menschen am Sonntag moves in the other direction, creating a cinematic space in which events are spontaneous and unstructured. This temporal structure determines Berlin’s everyday as portrayed in the film and emphasizes the booming culture of recreation in Weimar Germany. The film spends most of its time in the greenspace around the city, but is bookended by workdays marked by perpetual motion. The film portrays an urban life founded on this dual environment: the rationalized workspace of the city is complemented by the escape to the country and ensuing return to the city. Berliners trudge through their working lives from Monday to Saturday, always waiting for the next Sunday. It is here that we can begin to make sense of the film’s final intertitles, in which the final shots, full of frantic motion after a film characterized by calm relaxation, are described as scenes of “waiting.” The day of leisure can only exist because of the income and infrastructure provided by the workers’ place in the urban economy. Their working lives comprise the majority of their activity and time, but the characters define their identities based on the one day of play rather than the six days of work. They exemplify Adorno’s critique of the notion of “free” or “spare” time, according to which “free time is shackled to its opposite.”48 In other words, free time “depends on the totality of social conditions, which 46 For similar claims of authenticity in other semi-documentary films, see the discussions of Der heilige Berg (1926) and Hunger in Waldenburg (1929) in prior chapters. 47 Frahm, Jenseits des Raums, 231. 48 Adorno, “Free Time,” 162.

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continues to hold people under its spell”—or, to put it more bleakly, “free time is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labour.”49 Menschen am Sonntag illustrates the environmental underpinnings of Adorno’s argument: it reveals the segmented spaces of vocation and recreation in the metropolis, which together form a functional whole, made possible by the huge expansion of Berlin infrastructure leading up to the film’s production. Whereas Stadt der Millionen compresses space to show all of Berlin within a feature film and Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt makes visible changes over time within a single space in the city, Menschen am Sonntag reveals the transformation of both space and time into recreational resources to be consumed by the workers of Berlin. The film depicts its protagonists sympathetically. They are real people, portraying themselves, and are likely not very different from many in the audience. And the protagonists seem to fully embrace their one day of leisure as compensation for six days of uninspiring labor. The film thus gently maneuvers its viewers into a position of identifying with the characters and therefore ultimately agreeing with the structuring economic conditions that divide space and time into unequal realms of work and leisure. But there is a catch: Menschen am Sonntag was filmed in 1929 and released in 1930. By the time the film was premiered, the stock market crash and economic crisis separated the viewers from the carefree summer depicted on screen. The film seems to capture, and set in motion, a moment of life that will inevitably have passed. Certainly, for many scholars, students, and fans of German film history, Menschen am Sonntag has taken on this status as a nostalgic image of a time, and an intact environment, that would soon be lost. Like the films discussed above, it curates a specific Anthropo(s)cenic view of urban space that emphasizes leisure and connections between the urban center and the seemingly natural periphery, while still implicitly reinforcing the hierarchies of labor and time that underly the very notions of center and periphery or workday and weekend. At the same time, the film provides an example of the unexpected, added value that film can provide as an ecological archive. Already in the months when it was first screened, given the sudden arrival of a global economic crisis and resulting changed context with regards to such polarities as work and leisure, activity and rest, landscapes of business and of pleasure, the film served as an archive of a very different mode of interaction between humans and their environment. In the years that followed, many of the film’s creators fled the Nazis, the sites of leisure shown on screen became the center of a government that decimated lives and landscapes across Europe, and the city of Berlin itself was reduced to rubble. Simply by virtue of its moment in time, the film attained the status of an inflection point within the ecological archive of German cinema, allowing 49 Adorno, “Free Time,” 162, 168.

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a return to a place that is different and inviting, a welcome space of respite from what came after. The next chapter (or epilogue) turns its attention to recent films that likewise reflect on earlier filmic landscapes, but with a deliberately critical gaze informed by a century of cinematic, environmental, and political history. The ecological archive of cinema thus becomes a space that not only records material histories and creative environmental visions, but also creates new paths. The final chapter considers films that welcome the viewer back into an unwelcoming cinematic environment and allow the viewer to see that environment anew.

Epilogue. Welcome Back: Reflexive Environments in Recent German Cinema It’s a picture of a forest, in a fantastic morning light, and it looks like an impressionist painting by Manet. But when you look closely you see there are dead bodies all over the forest . . .1

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have explored genres from German cinema ranging from the city symphonies and the mountain films of the 1920s and 1930s to the idyllic Heimat films of the 1950s. Chapter 2 demonstrated that filmic narratives and images, as well as the discourse surrounding films, displayed a wide array of environmental ideals in relation to Heimat ideas through the Weimar era, but over the course of the Nazi era, the notion of Heimat on film was consolidated into the much narrower range of ideas and visual tropes of the Heimatfilm genre. Meanwhile, as the second part of the book showed, films engaged with infrastructure at diverse levels, reflecting on infrastructural projects and rendering them visible on screen, while catalyzing the growth of infrastructures in the physical world. Therefore, in both the discursive realm of Heimat and the material realm of infrastructures, these German films provide an ecological archive of changing German environments in the 1920s through 1950s, providing an environmental history that developed alongside the psychological history traced by Siegfried Kracauer in his landmark 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler. One might question the value of studying the environmental implications of film within a nationally defined archive. After all, the nonhuman world is not structured around political boundaries, and some of the genres studied in the preceding chapters are explicitly focused on landscapes that transcend national boundaries. This issue is perhaps most noticeable in the mountain films created on location in various countries that share the Alps, but it also bears relevance for urban and industrial films that show landscapes shaped by transnational systems of economic exchange, scientific knowledge production, and technological advancement. Neither the environments shown nor the human forces that shape them within the Anthropocene are contained within national borders. Jennifer Fay’s book, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of he chapters up to this point

1

Christian Petzold, quoted in Young, “The Past Is Not Myself,” 40.

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the Anthropocene, therefore takes a global approach such that each of her chapters “focuses on rather exceptional filming locations in which earth and world, hospitality and its negation are in acute and destructive tension . . . The locations are all part of the same modern human world, even if they are separated by distance and time.”2 Fay’s analyses of films shot on site in locations from North America to Asia to Antarctica suggest that a study of cinema in the time of the Anthropocene might be well served by a global approach that mirrors the global impact of humans on the planet they inhabit. And yet, as Christof Mauch points out, “ideas about nature . . . are often closely bound up with notions of national identity: thus, the nation, although an entirely human construct, is indeed a viable unit for considering the history of the environment.”3 Moreover, as William Cronon emphasizes, the stories people tell about the environment shape their views and impact their actions in relation to the nonhuman world, and those stories are filtered through languages and cultural contexts that frequently take shape within nationally defined territories and identities.4 In the introduction’s extension on the social-ecological model for environmental history, in which film acts as a particularly powerful means to inspire behaviors that can impact the physical world, the impacts of film are often concentrated within national boundaries; this trait is particularly evident in structures of film funding and distribution. As a result, an environmental history of German film might prove valuable not only for the study of German cinema, but also for the study of the environment. This epilogue takes the study of national filmic environments a step further: it not only looks back through the environments of German films, but explores how films themselves take on this self-reflective task of returning to past cinematic landscapes. As the prior chapters have shown, film displays material environments and creatively imagines new possibilities; the ecological archive of cinema therefore exists in a state of tension between human creativity and the limits (and possibly agency) exerted by the nonhuman world. It simultaneously contributes to ecological change and records current moments in material environments and environmental discourses. Moreover, films can also look back on, and welcome the viewer back into, these past environments and discourses. Welcoming the viewer into the Anthropocene thus becomes an act of welcoming back to a place that has already been seen. The introduction discussed ideas from Derrida and Levinas regarding welcome, hospitality, and ethics in relation to a never fully knowable Other. When saying “welcome to the Anthropocene” within the context of a film, a film’s image, voice, and 2 Fay, Inhospitable World, 16. 3 Mauch, “Introduction,” 2. 4 Cronon, “A Place for Stories,” 1370; Mauch, “Introduction,” 6.

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movement signify in multiple, open-ended, and sometimes conflicting ways; a welcome within film might therefore approach the sort of radical hospitality that welcomes the guest without claiming absolute authority as host, so that the “inhospitable world” that Jennifer Fay diagnoses within filmic space might offer a realm in which all might take on the role of guests, but none is fully at home. Revisiting and critiquing past filmic environments is nothing new: German films have done it all along. The classic leftist political film Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt (Kuhle Wampe, or: Who Owns the World?), released in 1932, offers an example: In the film’s rejection of idyllic parkland environments at Berlin’s periphery in favor of the political energy gained through crowded urban spaces, we might see a deliberate response to both the leisure-oriented environments seen in Menschen am Sonntag and the apolitical celebration of motion and circulation (in both work and entertainment scenes) in Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt. Later, after the Heimat films of the 1950s, a wave of antiHeimat films made by New German Cinema filmmakers responded with images of rural communities marked by violence and stifling intolerance. Both the celebration of the environments in early city symphonies and Heimat films, and the political critiques that shortly followed, now form the ecological archive that we can revisit in German film history. What interests me in this final chapter is how recent films have looked back on this landscape from a distance, based on an understanding of the social and political tumult of the twentieth century as well as the role played by film within that process, and within the context of an Anthropocene idea that provides an environmental corollary to these social and political histories. Building on the image archive of cinema, a “welcome to the Anthropocene” might be reframed as an invitation to return to something that has already been creatively imagined and visually represented, and to look at it anew. Of course, these past environments are not necessarily inviting. German cinematic environments are likely to bear memories of war and trauma, even if they appear idyllic. In the subtitle of her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, an anthropological study that explores possibilities for resilience and community in the face of environmental and economic precarity, Anna Tsing describes her approach as a process of thinking about “the possibility of life in capitalist ruins.”5 In Germany, the experience of twenty-first century precarity in the face of economic and environmental “ruins” comes on the heels of twentieth-century experiences of mountains of literal rubble in postwar German cities. This environmental memory is registered in German cinema under the heading 5 The quotation from Tsing is the subtitle of her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World.

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of Trümmerfilm (rubble film). Following Tsing, to fully explore the possibility of life within these environments, one must acknowledge that the same filmic landscapes are founded upon histories of death. The atrocities of the Nazi era comprise a crucial context for the Trümmerfilme, just as they do for the wave of Heimatfilme that closely followed the rubble films, yet this context is largely absent from overt narrative content of the films. The remaining pages of this epilogue consider two final case studies. First, an analysis of Christian Petzold’s Phoenix from 2014 is woven together with discussion of the rubble films and Heimat films that sit in the background of Petzold’s feature in order to understand how Phoenix intervenes in the history of German filmic environments. The final film analyzed, the collaborative experimental documentary Forst from 2005, revisits the forest landscapes of Heimat films within a strikingly different political and social context. Together, these analyses explore ways in which recent films have engaged with challenging cultural and historical landscapes within German cinema by welcoming viewers back, with fresh and critical eyes, into their respective filmic environments.

Ruins, Revisited: Phoenix Phoenix was released in 2014 but displays striking parallels and contrasts to films released nearly seventy years earlier, just after World War II; my analysis therefore considers Petzold’s film in relation to two historical intertexts from the German rubble films and Heimat films. The German rubble film arose after World War II, starting with the first and most famous example, Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us), in 1946. These films created narratives out of the postwar rubble, often displaying scarred protagonists among the destroyed landscapes. The rubble films are generally not seen as a genre6—using Rick Altman’s terms, they share semantic traits of rubble imagery and traumatized characters but lack syntactic unity that might give narrative or thematic cohesion to a genre.7 Instead, they are generally described as a category of films united by historical and environmental context. In responding to rubble films, critics and scholars have noted parallels with the “haunted screen” of Weimar expressionism and film noir, due to an emphasis on lighting effects and angular, atmospheric filmic landscapes. Contemporary critics equated the films’ spatial disorientation with the clouded state of the German “psychic landscape” after World War II.8 6 Randall, “Austrian Trümmerfilm?,” 577, 591n12; Rentschler, “The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm,” 10. 7 Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” 12. 8 Rentschler, “The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm,” 13.

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Responses became more pointed in the 1960s, noting that the films offered an immersion in self-pity amidst an absence of critical self-­examination regarding responsibility and guilt.9 Robert and Carol Reimer sum up this assessment in a recent German film reference guide, declaring that rubble films “generally avoid points of view that might implicate viewers in the past or move them to ask questions about responsibility. The protagonists, with whom viewers are clearly meant to identify, are free of involvement in events of the Third Reich, except as powerless bystanders.”10 Die Mörder sind unter uns offers a useful example here. It displays one villainous Nazi, Ferdinand Brückner, who profited from his business and military connections under fascism, then easily converted his factories’ production from helmets to cooking pots after the war. The protagonist, Dr. Hans Mertens, served as a doctor under Brückner’s command and remains scarred by a mass execution of innocent victims, ordered one Christmas Eve by the businessman-turned-military officer. While Hans might be described as a bearer of “political guilt,” using Karl Jaspers’s term, he is first and foremost a victim, plagued by the memory of the execution he could not stop. The primary female character, Susanne, is a concentration camp survivor, but with no apparent connection to the Holocaust. The film does make one prominent display of the murder of Jews, as Brückner is shown reading a newspaper with a headline referring to Auschwitz and the millions gassed in the Holocaust, an inclusion that Eric Rentschler describes as “singular and bold” among postwar films.11 Yet nobody in the film is directly connected to the millions murdered; the city is populated by victims, none of whom is explicitly Jewish,12 while one wealthy perpetrator bides his time in his suburban villa. Staudte’s film opens with Hans trudging toward a bar amid the ruins. In the next sequence, Susanne arrives on a train, presumably returning from the concentration camp where she has been imprisoned during the war. While she wears simple travelling clothes and walks with discomfort, her face radiates the aura of a movie star. Locks of silky hair flow from behind her plain scarf, and her flawless skin is bathed in soft lighting.13 9 Rentschler, “The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm,” 14. 10 Reimer and Reimer, The A to Z of German Cinema, 217–19. 11 Rentschler, “The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm,” 28. 12 There are strong suggestions that one character, Mr. Mondschein, is Jewish, but it is left to the viewer to deduce this identity. In the early years after the film’s release, few critics made this connection. Weckel, “The Mitlaufer in Two German Postwar Films,” 85. 13 Robert Shandley notes that one “disturbing aspect of the film is the character Susanne.” In addition to the omission of any reasons why she was sent to a concentration camp, she is “the most beautiful, physically healthy-looking and mentally well-adjusted person in the film.” Shandley, “Rubble Canyons,” 134.

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Next, a tracking shot slowly advances toward an old tourism poster, hanging at an angle against the ruined wall of a train station. The poster proclaims, “Beautiful Germany,” in obvious contradiction to the surrounding ruined buildings and crippled humans. Finally, in a match dissolve, the medieval spires in the poster that represent German beauty are replaced by towers of rubble framed against the sky, with clouds slowly moving behind in a quasi-Bergfilm aesthetic. All of these elements from Die Mörder sind unter uns form the implied background for Christian Petzold’s 2014 film Phoenix. Martina Moeller describes Petzold’s film as a “Neotrümmerfilm,”14 and the film’s opening sequence echoes the establishing shots from Die Mörder sind unter uns, but both the moral balance and the aesthetic trajectory from Staudte’s film are turned on their heads. Petzold’s film focuses on Nelly— like Susanne, a returnee from a concentration camp, except that Nelly was imprisoned and nearly killed because of her Jewish heritage. Her face is disfigured by a gunshot wound. Following plastic surgery, she bears an uncanny resemblance to her former self; this becomes the inciting incident for the film’s plot. As Nelly reconnects with her former husband and friends, it quickly becomes clear to the viewer, and finally to Nelly as well, that her husband was responsible for Nelly’s deportation, and that her former friends are colluding to steal her inheritance. So, rather than a sole Nazi and a city full of German victims, Phoenix presents us with a single Jewish victim returning to a landscape that she slowly realizes is populated by former Nazis and unrepentant accomplices. No less striking than the narrative and moral reversal is the aesthetic contrast between Phoenix and Die Mörder sind unter uns. Staudte’s film, like other postwar rubble films, is marked by shadows and cloudy ruins. The chiaroscuro aesthetics of postwar rubble films have much in common with the contemporaneous film noir genre in the United States, and Phoenix has likewise been described as a film noir. It thus engages with a genre that is central to Jennifer Fay’s study of film in the Anthropocene. Fay discusses these films’ stories of hardscrabble detectives set in “urban habitats on the cusp of erasure” as “a kind of extinction narrative,” an analysis she weaves together with discussion of Roy Scranton’s meditation on learning to die in the Anthropocene.15 I suggest that Phoenix uses the same genre to do something fundamentally different. Instead of giving up and resigning themselves to death, characters face the death that already surrounds them in immediate postwar Germany—both within the filmic environments of their own diegesis, and within the film history in which they participate—and look for light. 14 Moeller, “Späte Trümmerfilme und ‘Neotrümmerfilm,’” 1–4. 15 Fay, Inhospitable World, 18, 97; cf. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.

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Phoenix, in spite of its overall affinity with the darkly shaded visions of film noir, begins and ends with a fade to bright white. At the outset, the context of brightness serves to further emphasize the fact that it starts in a moment of much greater emotional and physical pain than that seen in Mörder. In the opening scene Nelly arrives not as a beautiful woman on a train platform, but rather, as a barely seen and brutally disfigured victim. Nelly’s friend Lene is driving her through a border checkpoint on their way to Berlin. The American border guard orders Nelly to remove her bandages so that he can see her face. The frame does not reveal Nelly removing her bandages; instead, we see the guard, displaying what may be quiet shock, disgust, or shame, as he waves them through the border station. As the car drives away, oncoming headlights flood the frame with bright white light, over which the film title is displayed. Cristina Nord’s review in the taz aptly summarizes the symbolic implications of this opening: the film takes the bandages off of film noir and Trümmerfilm to reveal the hidden wounds.16 But while numerous reviewers pointed out that the film’s shadowy aesthetic shows deliberate affinity with film noir, less has been said about the ensuing fade to white, a visual effect that is echoed again at the end of the film. While Staudte’s opening sequence ends with a dissolve to the towers of rubble that seem to represent the German collective psyche, the gradual saturation with light in Petzold’s opening sequence foreshadows the very personal trajectory that Nelly will follow as she regains her strength, confidence, and voice. The fact that Phoenix flirts reflectively with the rubble film—calling to mind a familiar film-historical framework while also inverting its key structuring elements—will come as no surprise to viewers familiar with Petzold’s work. As Jaimey Fisher writes in his monograph on the director, Petzold’s films repeatedly display the social and political critique characteristic of Berlin School filmmakers. But unlike other works from the Berlin School, Petzold’s films “also uniquely exploit popular genres to achieve their impact,” creatively reconfiguring familiar genres for artistic effect.17 In Phoenix, Petzold’s reflective reinvention of the rubble film remediates the erasure of German guilt and Jewish victimhood, reversing the Trümmerfilm’s social and political omissions through equally exaggerated narrative and visual means. The film’s dance with past genres occurs in part through a play of shadows and light and through modification to clearly identifiable plot motifs, as well as through related and renewed attention to the organic bodies of the film. In Die Mörder sind unter uns, the romance between Hans and Susanne plays out through a series of bodies that are broken, then discarded, or damaged and then repaired—all in a matter of 16 Nord, “Phoenix.” 17 Fisher, Christian Petzold, 11.

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moments. The slowness and effort involved in the growth of organic bodies is absent, as is any messiness and complication when organic bodies are attacked. Hans’s psychological trauma arises from his witnessing of a massacre of innocent victims during the war. The scene is in a flashback over just a few moments of screen time. The bodies fall to the ground and the image changes; the film style mimics the murderous order given by Captain Brückner to “liquidate” the victims. It dispatches with the unpleasant scene quickly, showing the atrocity—a practice that itself has been hotly debated—and then quickly moving on. Later films approached this problem differently. In one example, Helma Sanders-Brahms’s film Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother), multiple execution scenes are drawn out over a span of minutes, using film techniques that counteract expectations for cinematic depiction of atrocities. In one scene, German soldiers chase Polish women and children who are trying to flee across a field, shooting them from behind as they flee. The narrator’s father (also named Hans) breaks down in tears immediately afterward, due to the fact that one of the women who had been murdered looked like his wife.18 His body responds viscerally to the horror that both he and the film’s viewers have witnessed, and this physical response is overtly thematized when the other soldiers decry his behavior as “blubbering” and shout, seeming to also lose control of their emotions, that they don’t like it any better than he does. In another sequence, this time in France, a series of prisoners are marched up the slope of a steep sand dune. The camera dwells on the victims for two full minutes as all are slowly escorted up the hill, lined up at the crest of the hill near the upper edge of the frame, and blindfolded, and then are shot by soldiers who are not seen within the frame. The drawn-out staging comprises an act of Brechtian Verfremdung such that the viewer must wait too long; no longer being carried along in immersion and identification, the viewer recognizes the bodies as belonging to actors as well as representations of fictional characters.19 When the shots ring out, the viewers are thrust into a dual recognition that they have been watching an artificial scene in which actors fall down, and also a representation of a fictional, historically grounded event in which bodies are destroyed. The example from Deutschland, bleiche Mutter carries out a return, or a (un)welcome back, into the environments of past atrocities 18 In fact, the woman in this scene is performed by the same actress, Eva Mattes, who play Hans’s wife, a technique that deliberately disrupts the sense of realism in the scene. McCormick, Politics of the Self, 199. 19 Rick McCormick discusses numerous distancing techniques that Germany, Pale Mother employs to disrupt the spectators’ identification with the film’s characters. He does not explicitly address the drawn-out depictions of violence that I discuss here, although this technique would align with his argument. See McCormick, Politics of the Self, 196–200.

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by training its gaze longer on the bodies in the process of their destruction, yet rendering these reenactments as deliberately artificial so as to avoid the voyeuristic fetishization of atrocities that has led many filmmakers to eschew realistic depictions of the Holocaust.20 Phoenix takes a different approach toward looking back at the ruins of German environmental film history. Compared with Mörder, Phoenix is even more stringent in its avoidance of depicting Nazi atrocities. The event that initiates the film’s plot—a death march from a concentration camp during which the protagonist Nelly is shot in the face and left for dead—is never seen. Interviews reveal that Petzold did in fact film this sequence. It was initially conceived as an impressionistic opening sequence for the film, but then he discarded it, later explaining: “It felt like ‘literature’—and when I shot it, I felt embarrassed, ashamed, because I had done the same thing that all the other Holocaust movies do. They think they can make pictures of the Holocaust, and that’s not possible.”21 The quotation at the beginning of the present chapter comes from Petzold’s description of the deleted sequence. When asked about the opening sequence in an interview about Phoenix, Petzold replies: We originally started with another scene. We always shoot chronologically, so on the first day we shot a scene based on a photograph taken during the time of the Holocaust, from the Shoah Foundation. It’s a picture of a forest, in a fantastic morning light, and it looks like an impressionist painting by Manet. But when you look closely you see there are dead bodies all over the forest—it’s after the liberation of Auschwitz, there was a death march, and they killed the people in the forest during the march. The original opening was a surreal scene, where you see the bodies and people being shot and then the Wehrmacht leave the frame. You hear piano music coming from somewhere and one of the “dead” bodies comes to life, and it’s Nelly, and she walks through the forest as the titles start.22

Petzold chose not to include this sequence, declaring: “It was wrong. Perhaps we had to make this sort of mistake to locate the sort of ellipsis and space that was necessary to produce Phoenix.”23 Filming an entire scene of a movie is a very involved process; Brad Prager therefore suggests that “the destruction of footage is a remarkably performative gesture” and wonders whether Petzold knew that he might reject the footage 20 Petzold has taken a clear stance on the issue, stating that to show Holocaust atrocities on screen would be “an impertinence” (“eine Unverschämtheit”). Prager, Phoenix, 29–31. 21 Young, “The Past Is Not Myself,” 40. 22 Young, “The Past Is Not Myself,” 40. 23 Quoted in Nayman, “Christian Petzold’s Phoenix,” n.p.

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when he began filming it.24 Whether or not it was intentional, by starting with a seemingly idyllic, impressionistic forest, then revealing the idyllic landscape to be a site of horror, and finally rejecting the scene altogether, the film carries out a distinct reversal of film history. Recall that the idyllic forest is a prime site of the Heimat genre, a film type that replaced the ruins of the Trümmerfilm genre of the late 1940s. The creation process and final cut of Phoenix travel through the Heimat genre and reject it in favor of a new kind of Trümmerfilm. Within this overall reversal of the trend from Trümmer to Heimat in German cinema, one earlier film offers another crucial intertext for Phoenix. Petzold’s 2014 film reverses the process carried out in the most popular movie of 1948, Rudolf Jugert’s Film ohne Titel (Film Without a Title). Johannes von Moltke describes Jugert’s film as “quintessentially a transitional film that illustrates the regrouping of (West) German cinema after 1945.”25 In Jugert’s film, the scene opens with three filmmakers—a director, a screenwriter, and the famous actor Willy Fritsch playing himself—debating what sort of film could be made. They declare that nobody wants to see a Trümmerfilm, and Fritsch asserts that making an anti-Nazi film would be tasteless (geschmacklos), a statement that reflects only halfironically on his own success in the Nazi film industry. The three filmmakers are interrupted by a couple, Christine and Martin, who are wandering through the idyllic heath landscape. The story of this couple becomes the story of the film itself—both the one the three filmmakers are planning, and the one the audience is watching in Film ohne Titel—and also lays out the trajectory of German film from the postwar rubble films to the 1950s Heimat genre. When the couple first meets, Martin is an urban antiques dealer; Christine is a household servant who grew up on a farm. Their travails during the war involve the social barriers that face two lovers from different economic backgrounds, the bombing of the cities, and the upheavals and displacements as they are forcibly moved or seek safety. Much of their story is told by the screenwriter, who is acquainted with the story from past encounters, but they do not yet know how the story ends. In the film’s final sequences, multiple scenarios are offered. First, the screenwriter offers a bleak picture in which Martin searches for Christine but finds her marrying another man; he walks away in the rain, amidst slanted shots of ruins: it is a deliberate imitation of the grim and expressionistic imagery of the Trümmerfilme. Fritsch rejects this tale and offers his own rendition, an excessively perky happy ending filled with music and dance, recalling his successful romantic comedies produced by UFA during the Nazi era. For the ultimate conclusion, the director invites them to speak with Christine and Martin themselves so that they 24 Prager, Phoenix, 31. 25 Moltke, No Place Like Home, 77.

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can return to “reality.” As Moltke points out, “the ‘true story’ that carries the day contains more than a bit of both the Trümmerfilm and of the kitsch favored by Fritsch,” yielding a “conciliatory ending” that “anticipates the cultural logic of the Heimatfilm” by using a pastoral setting to negotiate tensions between country and city, displacement and home, and tradition and modernity.26 Jugert’s Film ohne Titel of 1948 rehearses the familiar tropes of the ruins of postwar Germany, and postwar German cinema, and explicitly rejects them in favor of a narrative and visual aesthetics of reconciliation. In Phoenix, the discarded opening scene begins with a forest idyll like those of the 1950s Heimat genre that replaced the rubble films of the late 1940s. The idyll is slowly revealed to hide ongoing atrocities. In rejecting this framing narrative, Petzold has already torn off some of the cinematic bandages covering over the wounds of war and the atrocities of the Holocaust. Then, as Lene and Nelly cross a border checkpoint toward Berlin in the actual opening scene of the film, Nelly again removes her bandages at the command of the US soldier. Of course, the film viewer does not see the horrors beneath the bandage; Petzold’s refusal to show Holocaust atrocities surely accounts for part of the reasoning behind this choice. But by watching the soldier watch Nelly, the scene also thematizes that act of viewing. The soldier is not only viewing the horrible violence of the Holocaust; he is also standing at a threshold, looking at this visual reminder of violence as the body upon which it is written travels back home, from an unknown exterior space, into the ruins of Berlin. The film begins by reversing the deliberate transition away from the ruins carried out in Film ohne Titel. Upon arrival, it digs into the ruins—literally going under the surface and spending much of its duration in Johnny’s subterranean apartment, to reveal the literal and psychological ruins that had been left unexposed in the rubble films of old. From this starting point, Phoenix revolves around bodies, human and other, that are remarkable for their intactness, deformation, and regeneration. In the opening scene, as Lene drives Nelly across the border, she reports to the soldier that she and the car—both of whom seem to be in perfect health—made it through the war in Switzerland. The film emphasizes this point by stating it twice, as the soldier then shouts the information to others standing in the background: “She survived in Switzerland! Like the car!” Human and automotive body alike are deemed remarkable for being intact. The film begins at night, and after the opening scene, it never again leaves Berlin—so “in Switzerland,” which elsewhere might call to mind Alpine Heimat imagery, here suggests an unseen and unlikely refuge, a word met with skepticism and associated with survival and intactness that is distinctly out of place in this film. In the scenes that 26 Moltke, No Place Like Home, 77–78.

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follow, Nelly’s face is slowly revealed—at first, still in bandages but under bright hospital lights or outdoors in daylight; later, unwrapped but full of bruising and scarring from the gunshot wound and the surgery; finally, only in the last scene, Nelly’s face seems fully recovered, and her body is reintegrated into its new identity as survivor. She reveals her tattoo, the bodily marker of her time as an Auschwitz inmate, to Johnny in the same scene in which she sings “Speak Low,” her trademark song from her prewar life. This deliberate performance shows that she is the person Johnny has refused to see, twice over: she is the real Nelly, and she is a Holocaust survivor.27 It takes ninety minutes of slow, painful recovery of her nearly destroyed body to arrive at this point. The slow process of healing in Phoenix offers another reversal in response to Die Mörder sind unter uns. The latter film hinges on two turning points based on bodies undergoing dramatic changes, shown quickly and neatly on screen. First, the massacre described above occurs in a few seconds. The bodies fall over without a sound; only Hans’s psychological pain seems to be drawn out or messy. Then, when Hans finally overcomes his trauma and regains a sense of purpose, it occurs because he happens to be nearby when a child is gravely ill and needs surgery. He is walking together with Captain Brückner, whom he is considering killing with a revolver in order to avenge the innocent deaths from the massacre. But rather than quickly kill another person, he quickly saves one: a woman runs out of one of the half-ruined apartments, shouting that her daughter can’t breathe and needs help. Hans initially hesitates, but once he arrives in the room with the girl, he snaps into quick action. In crisp, efficient speech, he orders the girl’s mother to boil water and then puts a knife and a tube into a pot so that they will be disinfected. Using these materials, he gives the girl a makeshift tracheotomy. Although the preparation for the operation lasts three minutes of film time, during which girl’s quiet moans of pain are heard while Hans and the girl’s mother prepare the space, lighting, and tools for the procedure, the surgery itself lasts just twenty seconds. As the operation begins, a close-up shows Hans’s hands on the girl’s neck. Hans commands the girl’s mother to look away, and the command is obeyed by the camera as well as the mother: after a brief detail shot shows Hans’s hands bringing the knife to the girl’s throat, the image cuts to a point-of-view shot looking up at Hans from the position of the girl’s head. Her shallow breathing is heard, putting 27 Brad Prager writes that Nelly’s tattoo “speaks even more loudly than her singing voice.” He also compares the tattoo with scar shown by Odysseus in The Odyssey to prove his identity: “Whereas Odysseus’s scar was proof of his identity, Nelly’s tattoo establishes that she has become a different self—she has, in fact, journeyed away from home and returned with the identity of a Jewish Holocaust survivor.” Prager, Phoenix, 75.

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the viewer into the girl’s position of looking up helplessly at the doctor upon whom her life depends. But despite the immersive cinematography, the visual portrayal is as sterile as the knife in boiling water: no blood is seen, no gaps or wounds appear, no uneven edges mar the girl’s physical body. After twenty seconds, a surprise (cinematic) cut offers a brief transition to a contrasting scene of Captain Brückner’s lascivious frivolities at a nearby bar. (Before the operation, he and Hans were walking to the bar together; he has continued on his own while Hans stayed back to save the girl’s life.) Shortly, when the scene cuts back to the small apartment, the operation is finished and the girl is lying on the table without any visible scars. The editing decisions are understandable and effective: focusing on the tensions before and relief after the operation draws out the emotional impact of the scene without requiring excessive special effects or distracting from the emotional impact by triggering audience reactions to blood and gore. Still, after just twenty seconds of operating, Hans declares that “the danger has passed.” There seems to be no lasting wound. Phoenix welcomes the viewer back into the rubble environments of postwar German film, deliberately bypassing the idyllic Heimatfilm landscapes and instead returning, from the very first sequence, to the center of the ruins. Within this environment, human bodies are the natural features that seem to grow and coexist. But while Mörder makes a quick transition from sickness to health, Phoenix dwells on a single body and demands that the viewer attend to the wounds. It thus guides viewers back into an Anthroposcene created by the postwar rubble films, which, in order to build up new environments of the rubble, had ignored Naziera opportunists and swept aside victims’ broken bodies. Gernot Böhme describes the human body as the nature that we ourselves are.28 While the so-called economic miracle suggested that a new environment was being erected in record speed, Phoenix’s focus on one individual body provides a counter-narrative, emphasizing that on the level of the individual body, the “nature” of German cinema is marked by traumas that take much longer to heal.

Back into the Woods: Forst (2005) For one additional example of recent German films reflecting critically on the Anthroposcene of German film history, I turn to the forest and its role in Heimat films. For many 1950s Heimat films, the filmic environment is a rural village within a sheltering forest. But while trios of troubadours wander the forest in song, poachers lurk, and wardens seek and capture the poachers, the forest is not a place of dwelling. It is the ever-present 28 This assertion forms the subtitle of Böhme’s book, Leib: Die Natur, die wir selbst sind (Body: The Nature We Ourselves Are).

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periphery. This spatial constellation forms the foundation for my second example of films that welcome their viewers back into the unwelcoming filmic environments of German cinema. The Heimat genre has been broadly criticized for being rooted in escapist nostalgia, offering a whitewashed vision of the past that distracted from the traumas of the postwar present. As has been detailed in prior chapters, commentators have criticized the escapist, anti-modern, and anti-rational tendencies of the Heimat idea within the films.29 Following the popular genre of 1950s Heimatfilme, numerous so-called “anti-­ Heimat films” from the New German Cinema movement combatted the idyllic Heimatfilm image by portraying brutality, rigid hierarchy, and oppressive social mores as the hallmarks of life in the rural German countryside.30 The final film discussed here takes this critique in a new direction. The experimental documentary Forst, released in 2005, was made through a collaboration of German and Austrian filmmakers and refugee organizations. It shows the experience of residents at a refugee home (also called Forst) in an area of dense woods outside of Berlin. The film uses dark, disorienting images to convey the refugees’ experience within an environment that is designed to make them powerless. In the 1950s Heimatfilm, the forest was a site in which narrative tensions—sometimes arising specifically through refugee resettlement— were resolved. In the 1951 Heimat film Grün ist die Heide (Green is the Heath), the protagonist Lüder Lüdersen is an expellee from Silesia who lost the land he owned there at the end of World War II. At the end of the film, he gives a heartfelt speech to the community, a village in the Lüneburg Heath, where he has found a second home. “When I was in the forest here, often I felt as if I were at home again. The natural beauty comforted me and made me forget what I have lost.”31 His perspective as an outsider in a forest community offers a telling comparison with Forst. Lüdersen has been expelled from his homeland in the eastern parts of what had been Prussia. As a result, he “suffers from the quintessential postwar syndrome of Heimatlosigkeit.”32 Typical of the Heimatfilm genre, the beauty of the natural landscape provides comfort after the loss of his prior Heimat. The woods of the 2005 documentary Forst do the opposite. The film begins with a long aerial shot looking down over a vast forest. Rather 29 For an overview of critical voices on Heimat and Heimatfilm, see chapters 1 and 2 of the present study. 30 For an introduction to the anti-Heimat films of New German Cinema, see Moltke, No Place Like Home, 32; see also Rentschler’s chapter, “Calamity Prevails Over the Country,” in the book West German Film in the Course of Time, 103–28; and Schacht, “Fluchtpunkt Provinz.” 31 Quoted in Moltke, No Place Like Home, 4. 32 Moltke, No Place Like Home, 81.

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than an establishing shot that provides orientation, this opening image offers no points of reference.33 A voiceover describes the experience of arriving at the train station in Berlin and being driven to a refugee home in the woods. The speaker relates that during the drive from the train station, they received no communications or assurances that they were being brought to a safe and welcoming place. The sequence closes with the voice saying: “I knew that this forest would kill me.” Bettina Stoetzer’s discussion of the film details the ways in which it eschews traditional documentary techniques. Whereas a number of Alpine and Heimat films were first conceived as nature documentaries, then supplemented with narrative plots to make them more palatable to audiences, Stoetzer points out that Forst moves in the opposite direction. It withholds easy points of orientation and identification, instead “invok[ing] an affective landscape that haunts the individuals who live in it and isolat[ing] them from the rest of society.”34 Rather than tell linear narratives about clearly identified individual people, the film provides a series of disembodied voices describing their experiences, voiced over dark forest landscapes or interior shots that create a claustrophobic atmosphere. “Disorientation, mistaken identities, and invisibilities are the effect.”35 In the film’s last moments, the characters are finally shown clearly, with sufficient light and visual cues to locate them precisely within a room. The voice of one of the residents describes the refugees’ process of gaining awareness about options for political action, thereby gaining the power to resist oppression. Regarding outside groups that might want to help the residents, the voice cautions: “If you take our struggle like your struggle, then we can work. But if you think we are just miserable helpless people that need support from you, we don’t want that kind of support.” Having fled political oppression at home, they are not interested in becoming second-class citizens in Germany. But the film suggests that subaltern status is what the authorities and policies at the refugee home have in mind for the residents. The voice concludes that conditions will only improve when “the ordinary man in the street understands what is happening in the forest there. And then the ordinary man . . . has to make the decision whether he . . . wants that kind of thing to be going on in the neighborhood where he stays.” The narration declares that the residents of Forst do not want pity; as long as they are viewed as a subaltern group on the margins of society, or a problem to be solved, they cannot be free. Instead, what is needed is to be welcomed as a true neighbor.

33 My analysis builds on Bettina Stoetzer’s discussion of the opening sequence’s disorienting aesthetics. See Stoetzer, “A Path through the Wood,” 10. 34 Stoetzer, “A Path through the Wood,” 8. 35 Stoetzer, “A Path through the Wood,” 11.

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In essence, the film Forst articulates a demand for something close to the true meaning of hospitality or welcome, according to Levinas and Derrida: the request is to be acknowledged as an Other that exceeds the understanding of any person or group offering a welcome, rather than to be welcomed in a way that relegates the guest to unseen spaces, excluded from and unseen by mainstream society. The voice making these arguments is still unattached to any specific body, but it speaks with a firm tone and confident volume not encountered earlier in the film. Significantly, the implied empowerment results not from collective identity but from increased awareness. This climax offers a response to Peter Blickle’s critique of the Heimat idea. Blickle argues that by merging into a collective Heimat community, individual critical judgment is ceded to the will of the masses.36 But in the film Forst, situated in the prototypical sylvan site of Heimat, there is no such collective unity. The camera overtly works against melding the bodies and voices together, favoring medium shots over close-ups, and eschewing head-on shots of individuals or long-­distance crowd shots that would bind the group together. Instead, empowerment arises through a slow process toward political awareness. Forst responds to the fantasy of rootedness in the Heimat tradition by depicting a forest space in which nobody is at home but in which, the concluding scenes reveal, all might eventually be acknowledged as equally and mutually welcomed guests.

Conclusion and Return Phoenix and Forst expose contradictions and erasures that mark environmentally focused genres in German film history. They welcome the viewer back into cinematic environments of Trümmerfilm and Heimatfilm and highlight voices, narratives, and bodies that have been hidden in prior films. Their aesthetics subvert, and then reimagine, what environmental cinema can do—not as a form of propaganda (whether for racist bloodand-soil ideologies of nature, or for celebrations of contemporary environmental efforts), but as a way of acknowledging and probing the complicated past embedded into cinematic environments. Ecocinema scholars have suggested that environmental films might initiate new forms of ecological thinking. In this book as a whole, I have argued instead that film catalyzes processes already underway. The chapters within part 1 demonstrated, using case studies involving Heimat discourse in film, that cinema forms a focal point for conflicting environmental discourses that promote, resist, and critique landscape change. Part 2 analyzed filmic environments including futuristic cityscapes as well

36 Blickle, Heimat, 73.

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as semi-documentary portrayals of Alpine and urban spaces to illustrate that films function simultaneously as visual archive and creative catalyst for transforming infrastructures. The visual infrastructure of film simultaneously builds on and triggers further development of physical infrastructures in the non-filmic world. Certainly, environmental films can focus on big and unwelcoming transitions, rendering technologized environments visible, as in the case of the short film Welcome to the Anthropocene. But as the first case study in this epilogue demonstrated, films can also revisit troubled environments of film history. Moreover, as seen in Forst, filmmakers can use filmic environments to empower micro-communities, thereby creating opportunities to envision the Anthropo(s)cene anew. The Anthropocene concept has been justifiably criticized for the universalizing approach to the global environment implied by the term’s suggestion of a monolithic “Anthropos” that is damaging the earth’s ecosystems. However, a different approach is offered by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, chief scientific advisor for the Planet under Pressure conference that commissioned the film Welcome to the Anthropocene. Ostrom supports the notion of the Anthropocene because it requires a changed relationship and responsibility to the earth, but rather than advocating whole-earth solutions and a universalizing vision of humanity, she argues that climate change can best be combatted through “polycentric systems” and actions “undertaken by multiple units at diverse scales that cumulatively make a difference.”37 In the context of Ostrom’s suggestions, film technologies are not limited to the controlling gaze from above. They can also give rise to critically oriented and locally engaged film projects such as Forst. For both the environmentalist goals that Ostrom emphasizes in her notion of polycentric systems and the human conflicts and traumas built into prior cinematic environments, the films and ideas discussed in this epilogue show possibilities for film’s role in environmental action and social change. The goal here is not to train the viewer to be more ecologically minded, but to reconsider the possibilities of the medium. The chapters throughout this book have argued that German cinema provides an ecological archive that arose alongside the political and psychological histories identified in past histories of German film. Films provide a visual archive of material landscapes and environmental transformations, register the evolving discourses and debates encoded into German filmic environments, and also contribute new cultural energy that can intensify these processes and debates. The recent films discussed in this epilogue show an awareness of the ecological archive of German cinema; they deliberately welcome their viewers back into the troubled cinematic

37 Ostrom, “Polycentric Systems,” 550.

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environments of German film history. They offer a welcome that is perhaps no longer unwelcome, but is certainly still uncomfortable. In this approach to environmental cinema, productive discomfort results not from the dystopian horrors of the Anthropocene but from the inherent unknowability that separates self, other, and environment in the filmic Anthroposcene.

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Wells, H. G. “Mr. Wells Reviews a Current Film.” In Minden and Bachmann, Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” 94–100. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, ed. Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Wilms, Wilfried. “From ‘Bergsteiger’ to ‘Bergkrieger’: Gustav Renker, Luis Trenker, and the Rebirth of the German Nation in Rock and Ice.” Colloquia Germanica 42, no. 3 (2009): 229–44. Winiwarter, Verena, and Martin Knoll. Umweltgeschichte. Cologne: Böhlau, 2007. Wormbs, Nina. “Eyes on the Ice: Satellite Remote Sensing and the Narratives of Visualized Data.” In Media and the Politics of Arctic Climate Change: When the Ice Breaks, edited by Miyase Christensen, Annika E. Nilsson, and Nina Wormbs, 52–69. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ———. “Shrinking sea ice as a prism of climate change understanding.” RCC Lunchtime Colloquium, November 11, 2021. Video posted on­ line November 17, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME bufMP0ojM. Yacavone, Daniel. Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Young, Neil. “The Past Is Not Myself.” Sight and Sound 25, no. 6 (2015): 38–41. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Colin Waters, and Martin Head. “Anthropocene: Its Stratigraphic Basis.” Nature 541 (2017): 289. Zsuffa, Joseph. Béla Balázs: The Man and the Artist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Filmography Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt. Directed by Walter Ruttmann. Fox Europa, 1927. Cinema Europe III: The Unchained Camera. Produced and directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill. Photoplay Productions, in association with BBC, ZDF/Arte, and D. L. Taffner Ltd., 1995. Forst. Directed by Ascan Breuer, Ursula Hansbauer, and Wolfgang Konrad, in partnership with The Voice Refugee Forum, Women in Exile, and Caravan for the Rights of Migrants and Refugees. Sixpackfilm, 2005. Die Geierwally. Directed by Ewald André Dupont. Gloria-Film and Henny Porten Filmproduktion, 1921. Die Geierwally. Directed by Hanns Steinhoff. Tobis Filmkunst, 1940. Die Geierwally. Directed by Frantisek Cáp (as Franz Cap). Peter Ostermayr Produktion, 1956. Der große Sprung. Directed by Arnold Fanck. UFA, 1927. Der heilige Berg. Directed by Arnold Fanck. UFA, 1926. Hunger in Waldenburg. Directed by Phil Jutzi. Weltfilm and Volksfilmverband, 1929.

194 W orks Cited 

Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt? Directed by Slatan Dudow. Prometheus-Film, 1932. Menschen am Sonntag. Directed by Robert Siodmak, Curt Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Fred Zinnemann. Produced by Seymour Nebenzahl and Edgar G. Ulmer, 1927. Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück. Directed by Phil Jutzi. Prometheus-Film, 1929. Phoenix. Directed by Christian Petzold. SCHRAMM FILM Koerner & Weber, co-produced with Tempus Film, BR, WDR, and Arte, 2014. Sprengbagger 1010. Directed by Carl Ludwig Achaz-Duisberg. Terra-­ Filmkunst, 1929. Die Stadt der Millionen. Directed by Adolf Trotz. UFA, 1925. Der verlorene Sohn. Directed by Luis Trenker. UFA, 1934. Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü. Directed by Arnold Fanck and Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Sokal-Film, 1929. Welcome to the Anthropocene. Produced and directed by Owen Gaffney and Félix Pharand-Deschênes. Animation by Félix Pharand-Deschênes and Globaïa. Music by Earlyguard and HECQ. Commissioned by Planet Under Pressure, London, March 26–29, 2012. https://vimeo. com/39048998.

Index Achaz-Duisberg, Carl Ludwig, 74, 79–80 Adorno, Theodor W., 155–56 Allgeier, Sepp, 34 Alpine landscapes. See Bergfilm genre; tourism infrastructures Altendorf, Guido, 147n23 Altman, Rick, 161 Angst, Richard, 34 animals: field of animal studies, 38; in Die Geierwally, 35–41, 46–65, 94; in wildlife films, 63–64 Anthropocene concept, 1–6, 14–18, 23, 27, 146, 159, 160, 163, 174– 75; Anthroposcene distinction, 4–5, 8, 9, 14, 15, 38–39, 64, 150, 156, 170, 175 Anzengruber, Ludwig, 34 archive, definitions of, 12–13 Arendt, Hannah, 6 Arlberg region, 128–29, 135 Ashkenazi, Ofer, 43, 49, 50–51, 76n30, 84 Auerbach, Berthold, 43–44 Baer, Nicholas, 119 Balázs, Béla, 79, 116n4, 118, 119 BASF, 86 Bauern-Film genre, 90 Bavarian Alps, 33, 41, 48, 49 Beck, Ulrich, 5 Beheimatung concept, 93 Bellour, Raymond, 103 Berge in Flammen (Trenker), 58 Bergfilm genre, 10, 13, 22, 26, 48, 116–38, 158, 163; critical attitudes toward, 118–19; Heimatfilme and, 34, 39, 49, 90; Ruttmann’s Berlin and, 144–45; terms for, 116n3 Berlin: film industry and, 10, 26, 141– 43, 147–48, 153–56; infrastructure

in, 103–4, 107, 141, 143–44, 148– 50, 153, 156; parks in, 148–51; Wannsee lake in, 149, 153–54, 155 Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Ruttmann), 26, 114n67, 139, 141, 142, 143–48, 150, 151, 152– 53, 155, 160 Berlin School (filmmakers), 164 Biden, Joseph, 95, 96 blaue Licht, Das (Riefenstahl), 123 Blickle, Peter, 173 Bloch, Ernst, 17n46, 120, 121 Böhme, Gernot, 170 Bonneuil, Christophe, and JeanBaptiste Fressoz, 4–5 Bosch, Carl, 75, 86 Böß, Gustav, 148, 149 Bozak, Nadia, 9 Buell, Lawrence, 22–23 Bush, Alex, 119 BVG (Berliner VekehrsAktiengesellschaft), 154 Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Das (Wiene), 19n49, 21, 142 Carrol, Noël, 128 Carson, Rachel, 21 Catalani, Alfredo, 41n56, 42–43 Chris, Cynthia, 63–64 city symphony genre, 22, 26–27, 142–43 climate change, 2, 15, 28–29, 95, 174 Commoner, Barry, 111 Constam, Ernst, 131–32 Cowan, Michael, 151n33 Cowan, Nancy, 37 Cronon, William, 29–30, 64, 159 Deine Heimat (Fanck), 91 Denning, Andrew, 121, 126n39, 128, 136

196



Index

Derrida, Jacques, 15–17, 27, 36–37, 100, 159, 173 Deutscher Bund Heimatschutz, 84 Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (SandersBrahms), 165–66 Dickinson, Emily, 100 “discourse” defined, 25 Dobryden, Paul, 5, 8, 14 documentary genre, 67–68, 116, 143, 172 Dolomites, 88, 134–35 Dooren, Thom van, 47 Duisberg, Carl, 74–75 Dynamik der Gross-Stadt (MoholyNagy), 145 ecocriticism, 6–10, 21, 173 Edwards, Paul, 96, 102, 121, 137–38, 140 Egger-Lienz, Albin, 121 Eisner, Lotte, 19, 110 Ellul, Jacques, 85 Elsaesser, Thomas, 19, 66–67, 101 Fanck, Arnold, 34, 79, 91, 116, 118, 121, 123, 145 Fanck, Matthias, 134n63 Fay, Jennifer, 5–8, 14n34, 15–16, 18, 158–59, 163 film noir, 161, 163–64 Film ohne Titel (Jugert), 167–68 Fisher, Jaimey, 164 Forst (Breuer et al.), 161, 170–73, 174 Förster von Silberwald, Der (Stummer), 34 Frahm, Laura, 12, 22, 137, 154–55 Frank, Volker, 80–81 Frau, nach der man sich sehnt, Die (Bernhardt), 75 Frey, Mattias, 19 Fritsch, Willy, 167–68 Funke, Otto, 44 Gandy, Matthew, 96, 103, 107, 140, 154 Ganghofer, Ludwig, 34, 43n68, 122–24 Ganschow, Uta, 43

Geierwally, Die (various directors), 22, 24, 34–40, 43, 48–65, 66, 94; basic plot of, 40; images from, 33, 51, 57, 61; Čáp’s version of, 57–63; Dupont’s version of, 48–53, 54; sources of, 41–43; Steinhoff’s version of, 34n27, 39n49, 53–57, 58, 60, 63 Gerhardt, Christina, and Marco Abel, 19 Geßler, Mario, 148 Goebbels, Joseph, 54, 88, 89 Graubünden: automobile ban in, 122, 130 Gronostay, Walter, 73 Gropius, Walter, 101, 104 Groß, Robert, 131 große Sprung, Der (Fanck), 26, 132–38 Grün ist die Heide (Deppe), 171 Gunning, Tom, 52, 114 Haid, Hans, 41 Haller, Albrecht von, 120 Haque, Kamaal, 134n63 Haraway, Donna, 28, 36–37 Harbou, Thea von, 108, 111, 112 Hauptmann, Gerhard, 72 Hediger, Vinzenz, and Patrick Vonderau, 66–67, 75–76 heilige Berg, Der (Fanck), 26, 118, 119, 125–32, 133, 135–36, 137– 38; literary source for, 123, 124–25 Heimat concept, 10, 23–24, 29–32, 63–65, 66, 85, 94, 158, 173; definitions of, 17n46, 29, 30 Heimatfilm genre, 9, 22, 23–25, 27, 30, 32–34, 48–49, 51, 58, 60, 63–65, 90, 94–95, 158, 171; Jewish filmmakers and, 84n43; journalists on, 92–93; New German Cinema reaction against, 160, 171; Ruttmann’s Berlin and, 144–45; term usage, 91. See also industrial Heimat films; Nazi film ideology Heimatfilmwelle of the 1950s, 39, 90, 161, 167–68, 170, 171

Heimatliteratur genre, 32, 33–34, 42–45, 70, 122–23 Herf, Jeffrey, 78 Hillern, Wilhelmine von, 24, 28, 35, 39, 41–47, 49, 51, 55, 58, 62 Höfig, Willi, 33 Holocaust, 19n49, 162, 166, 168, 169 Hopkinson, Peter, 21 hospitality and welcoming, 6, 14–18, 27, 159–60, 173 Hunger in Waldenburg (Jutzi), 24, 67–73, 87 Hunte, Otto, 110 IG Farben (Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie), 74, 75, 85, 86, 87 Imhoff, Karl, 112 industrial Heimat films, 24–25, 66–93; definitions of, 66, 75–76 infrastructure: definitions of, 25, 95–97, 140; field of infrastructure studies, 96; in film, 97–98; in Metropolis, 102–11, 114. See also Berlin; Paris; tourism infrastructures; transportation infrastructures Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, 95–96 Ingram, David, 128 Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann, 14, 86, 112–13 Ivakhiv, Adrian, 8n20, 9, 12–13, 18, 66 Jacobi, Lucy von, 78–79, 80, 84 Jacobson, Brian, 5, 8, 14, 97–98 Jäger, Ernst, 79, 80, 85 Jasper, Karl, 162 Kaes, Anton, 19, 144n14 Kant, Immanuel, 15, 44 Kapp-Putsch, 102, 104 Karwendel, 41, 58 Kettelhut, Erich, 101 Kirby, Lynne, 20n55 Koepnick, Lutz, 154

Index



197

Kracauer, Siegfried, 6, 18, 19n49, 22–23, 30, 158; on Bergfilm genre, 118–19; on Ruttman’s Berlin, 144n13 Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt (Dudow), 160 Lang, Fritz, 103–6. See also Metropolis Lechtal, 41, 46 Leni, Paul, 48–49 Lerski, Helmar, 84 Lethen, Helmut, 110–11 letzte Mann, Der (Murnau), 142 Leunawerke factory, 75, 79, 80–81 Levinas, Emmanuel, 16, 27, 159, 173 lighting, German vs. American, 21 MacDonald, Scott, 7 Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), 147 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 20 Marx, Karl, 139 material ecocriticism, 8–9, 24, 112 Mathieu, Jon, 121–22 Mauch, Christof, 18, 159 McGilligan, Patrick, 103 Menschen am Sonntag (Siodmak et al.), 26, 107, 114n67, 139, 140–41, 149, 150–57, 160 Metropolis (Lang), 8, 10, 13, 21, 25–26, 98–115, 141, 142; flooding in, 96, 100, 106, 109–11, 112, 113, 144; heart machine in, 108, 110; Rotwang’s house in, 106 Meyer aus Berlin (Lubitsch), 133 Mitman, Gregg, 64 modernism, 78, 121, 127, 145 Moeller, Martina, 163 Moholy-Nagy, László, 145 Moltke, Johannes von, 19, 33n24, 34, 48, 63, 167, 168 montage, 68, 69, 107, 144, 145, 147, 152 Mörder sind unter uns, Die (Staudte), 161, 162–66, 169–70 Morton, Timothy, 6, 9, 14, 37 Muybridge, Eadweard, 20

198



Index

nationalism, 18, 31, 54–55, 159 Nazi film ideology, 25, 31, 54, 55, 58, 88–93, 124, 151n33 Neumann, Dietrich, 100–101 new materialisms, 13–14 “New Woman” figure, 77 Nibelungen, Die (Lang), 21 Nord, Cristina, 164 Noske, Gustav, 104 Oppau explosion, 86 Ostermayr, Peter, 57–58 Ostrom, Elinor, 174 Other, the, 16, 17–18, 159 Ötztal, 40, 41, 44, 46, 48, 49, 55 Paris, sewers in, 104. See also Metropolis Petzold, Christian, 158, 164, 166–67 Pfeffer, Wilhelm, 20 Phoenix (Petzold), 27, 161, 162–70, 173 Pinthus, Kurt, 48 Pithon, Rémy, 116n3 pollution, 80–81, 100, 111–12, 114; film industry and, 4, 9 Pommer, Erich, 106 Porten, Henny, 48–51 Prager, Brad, 166–67, 169n27 prodigal son trope, 32, 76n30, 88 Radkau, Joachim, 7 Reimer, Robert and Carol, 162 Renker, Gustav, 26, 123–25, 127, 132 Rentschler, Eric, 19, 89, 162 Repas de bébé, Le (Lumière brothers), 5, 20 Rhine river, 111–12 Riefenstahl, Leni, 116, 118, 119, 123; acting roles of, 126, 132, 134 Rizzo, Salvador, 96n2 Robinson, Kelly, 21n56 Rofen, 52, 60 Rollins, William, 84 Rosenfeld, Fritz, 118, 127

Rosi, Sergio and Daniele, 134n63 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 120 rubble films. See Trümmerfilme Rushdie, Salman, 63 Rütting, Barbara, 61, 62 Sander, Alfred, 106 Scharnowski, Susanne, 43, 45 Scheffler, Karl, 148 Schneeberger, Hans, 34, 132 Schneider, Hannes, 121, 128, 145 Schonig, Jordan, 5 Schüfftan, Eugen, 152n34 Schwarzwaldmädel (Deppe), 90 Scranton, Roy, 163 Seeßlen, Georg, 64 Shandley, Robert, 162n13 Shrubb, Michael, 53 Siodmak, Robert and Curt, 153 Skaldes, Kurt, 92–93 skiing, 26, 34, 116, 128–33, 135–38, 144–46 Skladanowsky brothers, 8 “skyscraper mania” in Weimar Germany, 100–101, 114 Smuts, Barbara, 36–37 Sofronieva, Tzveta, 4, 8, 14 Sölden, 40, 55n99 Sontag, Susan, 119 SOS Eisberg (Fanck), 119 Sprengbagger 1010 (Achaz-Duisberg), 24, 72, 73–87, 92, 94; abridgment of, 78n31; title of, 76n29, 84 Spyra, Johanna, 120 Stadt der Millionen, Die (Trotz), 26, 139, 141, 147–51, 156 Stainer-Knittel, Anna, 41, 46 Stalker (Tarkovsky), 9 Steub, Ludwig, 41, 46 Stoetzer, Bettina, 172 Stürme über dem Montblanc (Fanck), 119 Terra Film, 75 Teure Heimat (Wilhelm), 91–92 Things to Come (Menzies, screenplay by H. G. Wells), 109, 113–14 Thoma, Ludwig, 93

Thoreau, Henry David, 21 tourism infrastructures, 10, 26, 58, 62, 117, 119–20, 121–22, 130–32, 136–38 transcorporeality, 113 transportation infrastructures, 20, 22, 107, 136, 139–40, 144, 150, 153–54 Trenker, Luis, 34, 58, 88–89, 125, 132 Trip to the Moon (Méliès), 5 Trümmerfilme, 27, 160–62, 163, 164, 167–68, 173 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 9, 14, 24, 28–29, 160, 161 Uekötter, Frank, 103 UFA studios, 6, 21, 68, 113, 138, 167 Ulmer, Edgar, 153 Ums tägliche Brot. See Hunger in Waldenburg verlorene Sohn, Die (Trenker), 24, 88–89 Vidor, King, 21 Volkstheater, 34 Völmecke, Jens-Uwe, 73

Index



199

Vorarlberg: tourism ban in, 122; ski advertising in, 129–30 Wagner, Martin, 150, 154 Walde, Alfons, 121 Walshe, Maire, 42–43 Weber, Die (Zelnik; screenplay by Gerhard Hauptmann, Fanny Carlen, and Willy Haas), 72 weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü, Die (Fanck and Pabst), 90, 91 weiße Stadion, Das (Fanck), 145 Welcome to the Anthropocene (short film), 1–3, 14–17, 159–60, 174 welcoming. See hospitality Wells, H. G., 100–101, 102–3, 108–9, 113–14, 115 Wenn der weiße Flieder wieder blüht (Deppe), 90 Wilder, Billy, 153 Winiwarter, Verena, and Martin Knoll, 10–11 Wizard of Oz, The (Fleming), 63 Wunder des Schneeschuhs (Fanck and Schneider), 121, 145 Zille, Heinrich, 72 Zinnemann, Fred, 153